English and French Speech Processing: Some Psycholinguistic Investigations

Syllables are identified faster than features or phonemes, at any rate in initial position of the target-item (Savin & Bever, 1970). This demonstration has led many authors to suggest that the syllable is the basic segment in speech perception and that phonemes can only be derived from the analysis of the perceptually primary segment, namely, the syllable. Considerable disagreement remains as to how this observation ought to be interpreted. Savin & Bever considered, that the phoneme had linguistic rather than psychological reality. Their interpretation, however, came up against considerable criticism from several authors including McNeil & Lindig (1973), Healy & Cutting (1976), Foss & Swinney (1973).

[1]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Monitoring sentence comprehension , 1979 .

[2]  D. Swinney,et al.  On the Psychological Reality of the Phoneme: Perception, Identification, and Consciousness. , 1973 .

[3]  David McNeill,et al.  The Perceptual Reality of Phonemes, Syllables, Words, and Sentences. , 1973 .

[4]  The Perceptual Integration of Sentences: Syntactic and Semantic Aspects , 1982 .

[5]  Donald J. Foss,et al.  Identifying the speech codes , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[6]  Morton Ann Gernsbacher,et al.  Cracking the Dual Code: Toward a Unitary Model of Phoneme Identification. , 1983, Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior.

[7]  Jacques Mehler,et al.  The Role of Syllables in Speech Processing: Infant and Adult Data [and Discussion] , 1981 .

[8]  J. Mehler,et al.  Tails of Words: Monitoring Ambiguity , 1978 .

[9]  L. Tyler.  The structure of the initial cohort: Evidence from gating , 1984, Perception & Psychophysics.

[10]  C. Mills,et al.  Effects of the match between listener expectancies and coarticulatory cues on the perception of speech. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

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

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

[13]  Ulrich H. Frauenfelder,et al.  Phoneme monitoring, syllable monitoring and lexical access. , 1981 .

[14]  D. Norris,et al.  A language-specific comprehension strategy , 1983, Nature.

[15]  J. Morton,et al.  Effect of word transitional probability on phoneme identification , 1976 .

[16]  Gary S. Dell,et al.  Positive Feedback in Hierarchical Connectionist Models: Applications to Language Production , 1988, Cogn. Sci..

[17]  J. Fodor.  The Modularity of mind. An essay on faculty psychology , 1986 .

[18]  William D. Marslen-Wilson,et al.  Central processes in speech understanding , 1981 .

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

[20]  James L. McClelland,et al.  The TRACE model of speech perception , 1986, Cognitive Psychology.

[21]  W. Kintsch,et al.  Language and comprehension , 1982 .

[22]  M. Turvey,et al.  Initial phonemes are detected faster in spoken words than in spoken nonwords , 1976 .

[23]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Phoneme identification and the lexicon , 1987, Cognitive Psychology.

[24]  A. Healy,et al.  Units of speech perception: Phoneme and syllable , 1976 .