English / N / And / L / Long Changes In The Continuous Speech Stream

The purpose of this thesis is to find the proper syllable segmentation in VCV sequence by comparing its durational cues with those of onsets and codas.The first chapter is the introduction of the syllable and rules of syllabification. Four different syllabifying rules are elaborately described and compared, with the obvious results that they are contradictory in defining the syllable boundary and several possible syllabifying results are available when different rules are applied.The second chapter introduces the experiment which is designed to compare the durational properties of the ambisyllabic /n/ and /I/ with the true syllable-initial and syllable-final ones to decide whether C in V1CV2 plays the role as onset or coda. Two influencing variables, stress pattern and their syllabic position, and the factor of different vowels are taken into account.The third chapter, the results and analysis of /n/ and /I/ are presented respectively. The durations of /n/ and /I/ behave similarly in the two and three phonetic sequences. ANOVA results prove that onsets are more influenced by stress than position while codas are not. From the durational changes in VL0CAVR0 , VL0CAVR1, VL1CAVR0 of the same position, ANOVA results show that both /n/ and /I/ comparably lengthen when R is stressed and show little durational variances whenever VL is stressed or not. Therefore, CA behaves more like the onset of a syllable.The fourth chapter, we mainly further our discussion about VCV sequences. Since the C in V1CV2 plays the role as onset, onsets should be maximized under the principles of phonotactics. Moreover, the factor of stress should be added into selecting the syllabifying unit as to guarantee the authenticity of the speech.In the fifth chapter, the experiment is summarized again and the future work about syllabification on vowels classification, the other consonants, perception experiments are discussed.