Computational Phonology

ing away from fast speech phenomena and a number of other complications, it is a demonstratable fact that German speakers unambiguously divide a word like Wodka as [v=t.kaq] in careful speech. This ability is put into perspective by the observation that the seemingly equally simple task of identifying the individual sounds which compose a word usually cannot be mastered by either children or adult illiterates. Apart from the mere grouping of sounds in a word the syllable functions as a natural reference for the description of many phonological processes in language. Note that e.g. the syllable-final /d/ of the Russian loanword cited above appears as [t] by a process known as Final Devoicing (to be described in more detail in section 4). Thus it appears that any phonological description of human language should attempt to capture this basic ability, which exhibits crosslinguistic universal tendencies but nevertheless has been shown to be of a non-phonetic and language-particular nature...