We pursue an analysis of the relation between qualitative syllable parses and their quantitative phonetic consequences. To do this, we express the statistics of a symbolic organization corresponding to a syllable parse in terms of continuous phonetic parameters consonantal plateau durations, vowel durations, and their variances. These parameters can be estimated from continuous phonetic data. This enables analysis of the link between symbolic phonological form and the continuous phonetics in which this form is manifest. We illustrate the predictions of different syllabic organizations and derive a number of previously experimentally observed and simulation results. Specifically, we derive the canonical phonetic manifestations of different syllabic organizations but also the result that, under certain conditions we can make precise, the phonetic indices of one organization can change to a range of values characteristic of the other, phonologically distinct organization. Finally, we explore the behavior of phonetic indices for syllabic organization by progressively increasing the size of the lexical sample and concomitantly diversifying the phonetic context over which these indices are taken.

Suggested readings :
 Shaw, J. and A. Gafos (2015). Stochastic time models of syllable structure. PLoS ONE 10(5), DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0124714.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0124714
 Shaw, J., Gafos, A., Hoole, P., Zeroual, C.(2011) Dynamic invariance in the phonetic expression of syllable structure. Phonology 28, 455-490.