Attentional Allocation to Syllables in American English

✍ Scribed by Steven A. Finney; Athanassios Protopapas; Peter D. Eimas

• Book ID: 102590416
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 144 KB
• Volume: 35
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0749-596X
• DOI: 10.1006/jmla.1996.0046

✦ Synopsis

Previous experimental studies in speech perception (e.g., Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & SeguıB , 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, Sebastia ´n-Galle ´s, 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.