This study investigated the explicit syllabification of CVCV words in French. In a first syllable-reversal experiment, most responses corresponded to the expected canonical CV.CV segmentation, but a small proportion included the intervocalic consonant in both the first and second syllables, a result previously interpreted for English as indicating ambisyllabicity. Two further partial-repetition experiments showed that listeners systematically include the consonant in the onset of the second syllable, but also often include it in the offset of the first syllable. In addition, the assignment of the intervocalic consonant to the first and second syllables was differentially sensitive to the sonority of the consonant and to its spelling. We argue that the findings are inconsistent with the traditionally held boundary conception and instead support the view that distinct processes are involved in locating the onsets and the offsets of syllables. Onset determination is both more reliable and more dominant. Finally, we propose that syllable onsets serve as alignment points for the lexical search process in continuous spoken word recognition.

In two experiments, French speakers detected cv or cvc sequences at the beginning of disyllabic pseudowords varying in syllable structure and pivotal consonant. Overall, both studies failed to replicate the crossover interaction that has been previously observed in French by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder and Seguṍ (1981). In both experiments, latencies were shorter to cv than to cvc targets and this effect of target length was generally smaller for cvc . cv than for cv . cv carriers. However, a clear crossover interaction was observed for liquid pivotal consonants under target-blocking conditions, Alain Content, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expé rimentale, ULB-LAPSE CP191, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 50, B-1050 Bruxelles Belgium. E-mail: acontent@ulb.ac.beThe present research was supported by grants from the FNRS, Switzerland (1114Switzerland ( -039553.93 , 1113Switzerland ( -049698.9 6 and 1114 ) and from the Direction gé né rale de la Recherche scienti que -Communauté française de . Preliminary reports were presented at the second AMLAP Meeting (Torino, 1996), and at the 1997 Eurospeech Conference. Ruth Kearns is now with Procter and Gamble Technical Centres Ltd. Thanks go to Christophe Pallier for comments on a previous version and to Nicolas Dumay for his help in the nal stages of manuscript preparation. and especially for slow participants. A third experiment collected phonemegating data on the same pseudowords to obtain estimates of the duration of the initial phonemes. Regression analyses showed that phoneme duration accounted for a large proportion of the variance for cvc target detection, suggesting that participants were reacting rather directly to phonemic throughput. These ndings argue against the hypothesis of an early syllabic classi cation mechanism in the perception of speech.How acoustic-phonetic information is mapped onto lexical representations constitutes a central issue in the study of speech perception and spoken word recognition. Various kinds of linguistic units, ranging from phonetic features to syllables, have been proposed to mediate the mapping process. Among these units, researchers have long considered the syllable as an obvious choice. Indeed, since the syllable constitutes the domain of most coarticulation phenomena, it appears to provide a natural way of dealing with the problem of variability in the signal. One in uential source of evidence favouring the hypothesis that syllable units are instrumental in speech processing comes from studies using the sequence detection task (see Frauenfelder & Kearns, 1996). In the original study (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Seguṍ, 1981), French subjects detected Consonant-Vowel (cv) or Consonant-Vowel-Consonan t (cvc) targets in spoken target-bearing carrier words whose initial syllable was either cv or cvc. For instance, pa and pal were detected in words like pa . lace and pal . mier.1 Detection latencies were shorter when the target exactly matched the rst syllable of the carrier word, with responses to pa faster in pa . lace than pal . m...

Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) is a language-speci c or languageuniversal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and any likely location of a word boundary, as cued in the speech signal. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CVC syllable with a schwa, or a CV syllable with a lax vowel. Although neither of these syllable contexts is a possible lexical word in English, wordspotting in both contexts was easier than in a context consisting of a single consonant. Two control lexical-decision experiments showed that the wordspotting results re ected the relative segmentation dif culty of the words in different contexts. The PWC appears to be language-universa l rather than language-speci c.The segmentation of a written text such as this one into its component words is a trivial task for the reader, because the writers have helpfully left empty spaces between the individual words. Speakers do not help listeners Requests for reprints should be addressed to Dennis Norris, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit,

The primary use of sequence monitoring (also known as syllable or fragment monitoring) has been to determine which linguistic units are involved in word recognition, and how these units might differ across languages. The task involves presenting subjects with targets that are either congruent or incongruent with a linguistic unit in the target-bearing item. Faster detection latencies to congruent targets are taken to indicate their perceptual relevance. For example, the finding that subjects are faster to detect a target when it corresponds to the érst syllable of the carrier than when it corresponds to more or less than the first syllable is called a syllable effect. This effect is interpreted as evidence for the perceptual relevance of the syllable. Since most research with this task has focused on the generalisability of the syllable effect across languages, this paper will focus primarily on this effect

Abstract. Cross-linguistic comparisons may shed light on the levels of processing involved in the performance of psycholinguistic tasks. For instance, if the same pattern of results appears whether or not subjects understand the experimental materials, it may be concluded that the results do not reflect higher-level linguistic processing. In the present study, English and French listeners performed two tasks -click location and speeded click detection -with both English and French senlences, closely matched for syntactic and phonological structure. Clicks were located more accurately in open-than in closed-class words in both English and French; they were detected more rapidly in open-than in closed-class words in English, but not in French. The two listener groups produced the same pattern of responses, suggesting that higher-level linguistic processing was not involved in the listeners' responses. It is concluded that click detection tasks are primarily sensitive to low-level (e.g. acoustic) effects, and hence are not well suited to the investigation of linguistic processing. R6sum6. Les comparaisons interlangues peuvent Eclaircir les niveaux de tra]tement impliquEs dans t'ex6cution des tfiches psycholinguistiques. Par exemple, si l'on observe le m~me type de rEponses, que les sujets comprennent le mat6riel experimental ou non, on peut en conclure que ces rdsultats ne refl~tent point des processus linguistiques de haut-niveau. Dans cette experience des auditeurs fran §ais et anglais ont accompli deux tfiches -localisation de clics et detection de clics acc61Er6e -en phrases fran~aises, et en phrases anglaises. Ces phrases Etaient bien appareill6es au niveau de leur structure syntaxique et phonologique. Les clics Etaient localisEs avec plus de precision dans les mots ~ contenu que dans les mots fonction en anglais, mais non en fran~ais. Les deux groupes d'auditeurs ont manifestE ces m~mes rEsultats; ce qui semble indiquer que les processus linguistiques de haut-niveau ne jouaient aucun r61e dans la performance des auditeurs. En conclusion on peut dire que la detection de clics est une tfiche qui est sensible principalement aux effets de bas-niveau, par exemple des effets acoustiques, et donc ne se prate gu~re ~ l'6tude des processus linguistiques.