The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant-vowel-consonant phonological structure were examined. orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency of pronunciation of the orthographic rime accounted for variance in latencies and errors beyond that contributed by the consistency of pronunciation of the individual graphemes and by other factors. In 3 experiments, as well, children and adults made more errors on words with less consistently pronounced orthographic rimes than on words with more consistently pronounced orthographic rimes. Relations between spellings and sounds in the simple monomorphemic words of English are more predictable when the level of onsets and rimes is taken into account than when only graphemes and phonemes are considered.

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Two lexical decision experiments tested the influence of briefly presented orthographically related primes on target word recognition in bilinguals. The prime stimuli were high-frequency words either from the same language as that of the target or from the other language known by the bilingual subjects. When the prime and target were from the same language, orthographically related primes systematically inhibited target word recognition, whereas orthographically dissimilar primes did not. When the prime and target were words from different languages, the amount of inhibition increased as a function of subjects' level of proficiency in the prime word's language, with highly proficient bilinguals showing practically equivalent amounts of within and across language inhibitory priming. These results strongly suggest that a printed string of letters can simultaneously activate lexical representations in both of the bilingual's languages (insofar as these share the same alphabet), even when subjects are performing a monolingual task.

How Do 4-Day-Old Infants Categorize Multisyllabic Utterances? Three experiments, using the high-amplitude sucking procedure. tested whether 4-day-old infants discriminate multisyllabic utterances on the basis of number of syllables or number of phonemes. Experiment 1 showed that infants discriminate 2 large sets of phonetically variable utterances composed of 2-vs. 3-CY (consonant-vowel) syllables. Experiment 2 was run to assess whether infants discriminated the 2 sets on the basis of duration differences between the 2-and 3-CV stimuli. Results indicate that reducing the duration differences does not affect infants' discrimination. Finally, Experiment 3 investigated whether infants discriminate 4-vs. 6-phoneme bisyllabic utterances. The results provide no evidence that infants are sensitive to such a change in number of phonemic constituents. AIthough not decisive, these results appear to be congruent with the hypothesis that infants perceptually structure complex speech inputs. Models designed to account for speech processing in adults do not agree about the necessity ofa prelexicallevel ofrepresentat ion during word recognition (for a review, see Frauenfelder & Tyler, 1987; Klatt, 1989). Some of them suggest that language users map the acoustic waveform onto units stored in the lexicon. But how do infants cope with the speech signal and represent it before they have constituted a lexicon? Acquisition of a lexicon requires a prelexicallevel of representation that mediates between acoustic inputs and memory traces that will constitute the lexicon (see Mehler, Dupoux, & Segui, 1991, for a discussion of this point). Several sublexical units have been considered to describe infants' prelexical representations. A number of mutually nonexclusive candidates can be evoked in this context, namely, phonemes, syllables, demi-syllables, moras, and feet. Moreover, it is possible that the efficiency of these different units depends on the development of the speech system and on the language that the child is in the process of acquiring. A review of the literature indicates that the phoneme Ranka Bijeljac-Babic

The present study examined the ability of newborns and 2-month-olds to detect phonetic differences between syllables. By relying on the modified high-amplitude sucking procedure, which did not permit the infants to use a simple same-different response, the present experiments tapped the perceptual representations of the speech sounds. Infants as young as a few days old displayed some capacity to represent differences in a set of syllables varying in their phonetic composition, although there was no convincing evidence that their representations were structured in terms of phonetic segments. Finally, evidence of developmental changes in speech processing were noted for the first time with infants in this age range. The change noted was a tendency from global toward more specific representations on the part of the older infants.

Monolingual infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language around 6 to 9 months of age, a fact marked by the development of preferences for predominant prosodic patterns and a decrease in sensitivity to non-native prosodic properties. The present study evaluates the effects of bilingual acquisition on speech perception by exploring how stress pattern perception may differ in French-learning 10-month-olds raised in bilingual as opposed to monolingual environments. Experiment 1 shows that monolinguals can discriminate stress patterns following a long familiarization to one of two patterns, but not after a short familiarization. In Experiment 2, two subgroups of bilingual infants growing up learning both French and another language (varying across infants) in which stress is used lexically were tested under the more difficult short familiarization condition: one with balanced input, and one receiving more input in the language other than French. Discrimination was clearly found for the other-language-dominant subgroup, establishing heightened sensitivity to stress pattern contrasts in these bilinguals as compared to monolinguals. However, the balanced bilinguals' performance was not better than that of monolinguals, establishing an effect of the relative balance of the language input. This pattern of results is compatible with the proposal that sensitivity to prosodic contrasts is maintained or enhanced in a bilingual population compared to a monolingual population in which these contrasts are non-native, provided that this dimension is used in one of the two languages in acquisition, and that infants receive enough input from that language.

The experiment reported here explores the ability of 4- to 5-day-old neonates to discriminate consonantal place of articulation and vowel quality using shortened CV syllables similar to those used by Blumstein and Stevens [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67, 648-662 (1980)], without vowel steady-state information. The results show that the initial 34-44 ms of CV stimuli provide infants with sufficient information to discriminate place of articulation differences in stop consonants ([ba] vs [da], [ba] vs [ga], [bi] vs [di], and [bi] vs [gi]) and following vowel quality ([ba] vs [bi], [da] vs [di], and [ga] vs [gi]). These results suggest that infants can discriminate syllables on the basis of the onset properties of CV signals. Furthermore, this experiment indicates that neonates require little or no exposure to speech to succeed in such a discrimination task.

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