Syllable Structure and External Evidence

Abstract

To determine what psycholinguistic evidence (or external evidence) such as slips of the tongue, monosyllabic word blends, and novel word games reveals about syllable structure, this investigation focuses on psycholinguistic research on the English and German syllable. English and German in particular provide a good testing ground for the evaluation of external evidence because much external evidence has been interpreted as revealing the internal organization of the syllable for both languages. After a review of the external evidence, f argue that psycholinguistic evidence does not reveal syllable structure but rather how the linguistic processor organizes syllable-internal segments.