Attentional Allocation to Syllables in American English

Abstract Previous experimental studies in speech perception (e.g., Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui 1986) have concluded that the syllable is not a prelexical segmentation unit for English speakers. The set of experiments reported here applied the attentional phoneme monitoring task of Pallier, Sebastian-Galles, Felguera, Christophe, and Mehler (1993) to American English and demonstrated a robust effect of syllable structure when second-syllable stress words were used, but no such effect with first-syllable stress words. We hypothesize that aspects of syllable structure related to word stress are an important factor in the detection of syllabic effects in English.

[1]  T. Bever,et al.  The nonperceptual reality of the phoneme. , 1970 .

[2]  Ulrich Hans Frauenfelder,et al.  The syllable's role in speech segmentation , 1981 .

[3]  Anne Cutler,et al.  The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access , 1988 .

[4]  M. Pitt,et al.  Attentional allocation during speech perception: How fine is the focus? , 1990 .

[5]  John M. Anderson,et al.  Three theses concerning phonological representations , 1974, Journal of Linguistics.

[6]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Exploiting prosodic probabilities in speech segmentation , 1991 .

[7]  Anne Cutler,et al.  The syllable's differing role in the segmentation of French and English. , 1986 .

[8]  R. Treiman,et al.  Syllabification of intervocalic consonants , 1988 .

[9]  D. Pisoni,et al.  Acoustic-phonetic representations in word recognition , 1987, Cognition.

[10]  A. G. Bills.  Facilitation and inhibition in mental work. , 1937 .

[11]  D. Norris,et al.  The relative accessibility of phonemes and syllables , 1988, Perception & psychophysics.

[12]  Dawn G. Blasko,et al.  Do the Beginnings of Spoken Words Have a Special Status in Auditory Word Recognition , 1993 .

[13]  A. Lahiri,et al.  The role of syllables in the perception of spoken dutch , 1993 .

[14]  A M Liberman,et al.  Perception of the speech code. , 1967, Psychological review.

[15]  S. Dornič,et al.  Attention and performance V , 1976 .

[16]  A. Cutler,et al.  Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception , 1992 .

[17]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Phonological factors in lexical access: Evidence from an auditory lexical decision task , 1988 .

[18]  Scott Myers.  Vowel shortening in English , 1987 .

[19]  William D. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Activation, competition, and frequency in lexical access , 1991 .

[20]  Ulrich H. Frauenfelder,et al.  Lexical effects in phonemic processing: facilitatory or inhibitory. , 1990, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[21]  Christophe Pallier.  Rôle de la syllabe dans la perception de la parole : études attentionnelles , 1994 .

[22]  Anne Cutler,et al.  The perceptual integrity of syllabic onsets , 1987 .

[23]  R. Rosenthal,et al.  “Some Things You Learn Aren't So”: Cohen's Paradox, Asch's Paradigm, and the Interpretation of Interaction , 1995 .