Consonant Cluster Syllabification in Preliterate Children

To determine the syllabification rules applied by listeners when presented with different types of intervocalic clusters, 13 4- to 5-year-old preliterate French-speaking children were tested using two tasks of disyllabic words segmentation: a repetition task of the beginning or the end of words, and a tapping task. Both tasks show comparable results. Data were compared to the segmentation solutions predicted by 5 different syllabification rules proposed by phonologists. It was shown that two of the tested algorithms fit these results. The language-specificity of children’s syllabification rules is discussed. 1