Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word-segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two computational models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vinter, 1998 in an experiment where we compare the lexical and sublexical recognition performance of adults after hearing 2 or 10 min of an artificial spoken language. The results are consistent with Parser's predictions and the clustering approach, showing that performance on words is better than performance on part-words only after 10 min. This result suggests that word segmentation abilities are not merely due to stronger associations between sublexical units but to the emergence of stronger lexical representations during the development of speech perception processes.

Syllable onsets are defined as the initial consonant or consonant cluster in a syllable (e.g., BR in BREAD). In the present study, using a letter detection paradigm and French words, we tested whether syllable onsets are processed as units by the reading system. In Experiment 1, we replicated Gross, Treiman, and Inman's (2000) result of observing no difference between the detection latencies of letters embedded in a multi-letter syllable onset (e.g., c in ECLATER) relative to a single-letter syllable onset (e.g., C in ECARTER). In Experiment 2, participants took longer to detect the target letter when it was in the second position of a multi-letter onset (e.g., L in TABLIER) than when it was a single-letter onset (e.g., L in ECOLIER). In Experiment 3, this position effect was replicated for graphemes. In Experiment 4, we tested and ruled out an alternative explanation of the unitization effect, in terms of lateral masking. These results indicate that syllable onsets are processed as perceptual units by the reading system and that the unitization effect is position dependent.

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