Substantial factors for decision-making in syllabification in Russian

Abstract

Present study investigates significant factors essential for decision-making in syllabification in Russian. Words representing various types of actual phonotactic constraints and regular phonetic processes in Russian speech has been elected as experimental dataset. Results of syllabification experiments reveal preferred individual syllabification strategies, among the most stable should be mentioned tendency for predominance of V-coda syllables over C-codas. Other influential principles of syllabification are: 1) predomination of consonantal clusters in syllable’s onset, 2) tendency to avoid syllables consisting of a single vowel, 3) a kind of a glottal stop at the beginning of vowel’s articulation at the word’s onset. Orthographic and phonetic transparency/opacity of a word has also been stated one of the crucial factors for syllables boundaries in consonantal clusters.