Syllable onsets are perceptual reading units

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.     

Perception of resyllabification in French

In three experiments, we examined the effects of phonological resyllabification processes on the perception of French speech. Enchainment involves the resyllabification of a word-final consonant across a syllable boundary (e.g., in chaque avion, the /k/ crosses the syllable boundary to become syllable initial). Liaison involves a further process of realization of a latent consonant, alongside resyllabification (e.g., the /t/ in petit avion). If the syllable is a dominant unit of perception in French (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981), these processes should cause problems for recognition of the following word. A cross-modal priming experiment showed no cost attached to either type of resyllabification in terms of reduced activation of the following word. Furthermore, word- and sequence-monitoring experiments again showed no cost and suggested that the recognition of vowel-initial words may be facilitated when they are preceded by a word that had undergone resyllabification through enchainment or liaison. We examine the sources of information that could underpin facilitation and propose a refinement of the syllable's role in the perception of French speech.     

The role of syllabic structure in French visual word recognition

Two experiments are reported in which the processing units involved in the reading of French polysyllabic words are examined. A comparison was made between units following the maximal onset principle (i.e., the spoken syllable) and units following the maximal coda principle (i.e., the basic orthographic syllabic structure [BOSS]). In the first experiment, it took longer to recognize that a syllable was the beginning of a word (e.g., the FOE of FOETUS) than to make the same judgment of a BOSS (e.g., FOET). The fact that a BOSS plus one letter (e.g., FOETU) also took longer to judge than the BOSS indicated that the maximal coda principle applies to the units of processing in French. The second experiment confirmed this, using a lexical decision task with the different units being demarcated on the basis of color. It was concluded that the syllabic structure that is so clearly manifested in the spoken form of French is not involved in visual word recognition.     

Syllabification strategies in spoken word processing: Evidence from phonological priming

Two experiments were conducted to examine which of two linguistic syllabification strategies, the maximal onset principle and the stress principle, is operative in auditory word recognition. Test stimuli consisted of bisyllabic words and nonwords containing two medial consonants, the second of which had a potential attachment to either the coda of the first syllable or the onset of the second syllable (e.g., MARKET). A phonological priming paradigm was used in which prime stimuli were artificially syllabified by inserting silence. In the critical conditions, the prime was consistent with the maximal onset principle (e.g., MAR-KET) or with the stress principle (e.g., MARK-ET). The results suggested that listeners prefer to attach a medial consonant to the onset of a syllable in a way that is characterized by the maximal onset principle. The results also indicate some use of the stress principle.     

Syllable monitoring in internally and externally generated English words

The ability of English speakers to monitor internally and externally generated words for syllables was investigated in this paper. An internal speech monitoring task required participants to silently generate a carrier word on hearing a semantically related prompt word (e.g., reveal—divulge). These productions were monitored for prespecified target strings that were either a syllable match (e.g., /dai/), a syllable mismatch (e.g., /daiv/), or unrelated (e.g., /hju:/) to the initial syllable of the word. In all three experiments the longer target sequence was monitored for faster. However, this tendency reached significance only when the longer string also matched a syllable in the carrier word. External speech versions of each experiment were run that yielded a similar influence of syllabicity but only when the syllable match string also had a closed structure. It was concluded that any influence of syllabicity found using either task reflected the properties of a shared perception-based monitoring system.     

Bodies and codas or core syllables plus appendices? Evidence for a developmental theory of subsyllabic division preference

Two experiments examining the subsyllabic division behaviors of Chinese-speaking children learning English as a foreign language (EFL) are reported. In Experiment 1, target phonemes of monosyllabic English nonwords were varied in phonotactic context (e.g., (C)VC vs. (C)CVC), marginality (e.g., (C)CVC vs. C(C)VC), and/or position (e.g., (C)VC vs. CV(C)) in phoneme deletion and isolation tasks, with confounds such as global similarity, vowel length, and targets’ sonority controlled. The fourth graders found the initial obstruent more difficult to isolate when it constituted the onset itself, i.e., (C)VC, than when it was part of a clustered onset, i.e., (C)CVC; no such difference was observed (non)word-finally, however. The results thus failed to support a subsyllabic preference for either onsets and rimes or bodies and codas. In Experiment 2, 49 second graders were tested on two other sets of phoneme awareness tasks and similar results were obtained. Items of one task were adapted from Hulme et al. (2002), in which the English-speaking first graders found the initial phoneme of a clustered onset, i.e., (C)CVC, more difficult to delete than the cluster as a whole, i.e., (CC)VC. The opposite patterns were observed with the Chinese EFL learners in Experiment 2, who found instead the initial consonant easier to remove. Taken together, the results suggested that Chinese-speaking EFL children process an English syllable as a linear combination of an intact core syllable (i.e., CV) plus its appendices. In both experiments, moreover, only performance in segmenting core syllable, but not that of segmenting appendices from the core syllable, predicted decoding success, a pattern again opposite to that of Hulme et al. (2002). The seemingly conflicting results were nevertheless consistent with a general developmental account of intra-syllabic division preference.     

The relation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of word meanings

Four experiments were conducted to explore the correlation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of novel words. In the first experiment, adult English speakers invented nonsense words as names for random polygons differing in visual complexity. Visually simple polygons received names containing fewer syllables than visually complex polygons did. In addition, analyses of English word-object pairings indicated that a significant correlation between syllable number and visual complexity exists in the English lexicon. In Experiments 2 and 3, adult English speakers matched monosyllabic novel words more often than trisyllabic novel words with visually simple objects, whereas trisyllabic matches were more common for visually complex objects. Experiment 4 replicated these findings with children, indicating that the assumption of a correlation between word and visual complexity exists during the period of intense vocabulary growth. Although the actual correlation between syllable number and visual complexity is small, other posited constraints on word meaning are also limited in strength. However, an increasing number of small, language-specific word-meaning correlations are being uncovered. Given the documented ability of speakers to detect and use these subtle correlations, we argue that a more fruitful approach to word-meaning acquisition would forgo the search for a few broad, powerful word-meaning constraints, and we attempt to uncover individually weak, but perhaps jointly powerful word-meaning correspondences.     

Semantic mechanisms in paralexia

This study explores the effects of semantic constraints on the occurrence of paralexic responses in two patients who tend to produce semantic errors in reading aloud. In the first experiment, semantic constraints were provided by using words as proper names (e.g., “brown” vs. “Sam Brown”), and in the second by using short, highly familiar phrases to restrict the meaning of the target word (e.g., the polar bear; green with envy). These constraints were found to be effective in reducing the frequency of paralexic errors.     

Early locus of a linguistic variable in a fast priming task

The syllable and the morpheme are known to be important linguistic variables, but is such information involved in the early stages of word recognition? Syllable‐morpheme information was manipulated in the early stage of word naming by means of the fast priming paradigm. The letters in the prime were printed in a mixture of lower‐ and upper‐case letters. The change from lower to upper case occurred either at a syllable‐morpheme boundary, before the boundary, or after it (e.g., reTAKE, rETAKE, or retAKE) creating either an intact pair or a broken one. The target was always in lower case (e.g., retake). The results of Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that intact syllable and morpheme information facilitated word naming at a short Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (below awareness) but not at a long SOA, suggesting that the use of such information is automatic. A second set of experiments attempted to determine if syllable information alone could facilitate word processing. In Experiments 3 and 4, monomorphemic words were divided either at, before, or after the syllable boundary (e.g., rePEL, rEPEL, or repEL). The primes were all pseudomorphemic in the sense that the initial syllables could appear as a morpheme in other words (e.g., restate) but were not morphemic in the target words (e.g., repel). The second syllable was neither morphemic nor pseudomorphemic. Using the same SOAs as in Experiments 1 and 2, intact syllables were found to be facilitative at the short SOA, but not at the long SOA. Thus, the syllable plays a role in an early stage of word recognition. Whether morphemes that are not syllables are facilitative is still to be determined in this paradigm.     

Phonotactic regularities in the segmentation of spoken Italian

Five word-spotting experiments explored the role of consonantal and vocalic phonotactic cues in the segmentation of spoken Italian. The first set of experiments tested listeners' sensitivity to phonotactic constraints cueing syllable boundaries. Participants were slower in spotting words in nonsense strings when target onsets were misaligned (e.g., lago in ri.blago) than when they were aligned (e.g., lago in rin.lago) with phonotactically determined syllabic boundaries. This effect held also for sequences that occur only word-medially (e.g., /tl/ in ri.tlago), and competition effects could not account for the disadvantage in the misaligned condition. Similarly, target detections were slower when their offsets were misaligned (e.g., cittá in cittáu.ba) than when they were aligned (e.g., cittá in cittá.oba) with a phonotactic syllabic boundary. The second set of experiments tested listeners' sensitivity to phonotactic cues, which specifically signal lexical (and not just syllable) boundaries. Results corroborate the role of syllabic information in speech segmentation and suggest that Italian listeners make little use of additional phonotactic information that specifically cues word boundaries.     

The contribution of prefixes to morphological processing of Spanish words

Three series of priming experiments were conducted to probe the morphological and phonological contributions to visual word recognition in Spanish. Prefixed, e.g., INCAPAZ (incapable), and pseudoprefixed, e.g., INDUSTRIA (industry) target words were presented for recognition following a prefixed, e.g., infeliz (unhappy), or pseudoprefixed, e.g., insulto (insult), prime starting with the same syllable as the target, at masked short or long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). At long SOAs the recognition of prefixed targets was facilitated by prefixed primes and inhibited by pseudoprefixed ones, whereas both prefixed and pseudoprefixed primes facilitated the recognition at short SOAs. In contrast, the recognition of pseudoprefixed targets was unaffected by the kind of prime presented, even when we used pairs of words overlapping in syllables that cannot be prefixes in Spanish. These results support a special status for morphological elements in access to meaning in reading.     

Mapping Words to the World in Infancy: Infants' Expectations for Count Nouns and Adjectives

Three experimentsdocumentthat 14-month-old infants'construal of objects (e.g., purple animals) is influenced by naming, that they can distinguish between the grammatical form noun and adjective, and that they treat this distinction as relevant to meaning. In each experiment, infants extended novel nouns (e.g., "This one is a blicket") specifically to object categories (e.g., animal), and not to object properties (e.g., purple things). This robust noun-category link is related to grammatical form and not to surface differences in the presentation of novelwords (Experiment 3). Infants'extensions of novel adjectives (e.g., "This one is blickish") were more fragile: They extended adjectives specifically to object properties when the property was color (Experiment 1), but revealed a less precise mapping when the property was texture (Experiment 2). These results reveal that by 14 months, infants distinguish between grammatical forms and utilize these distinctions in determining the meaning of novel words.     

New age-linked asymmetries: aging and the processing of familiar versus novel language on the input versus output side

This research demonstrates 3 new age-linked asymmetries between identifying versus retrieving phonological information. Young and older adults read aloud familiar isolated words (e.g., mind) and novel pseudowords (e.g., mond) in a production task and identified lexical status for identical stimuli in a comprehension task. Young adults made fewer errors than older adults in production but not comprehension (an age-related input-output asymmetry), and they produced pseudowords but not words with fewer errors than older adults (a lexical-status asymmetry). The lexical-status asymmetry also occurred for response onset times but not for output durations (an onset-output asymmetry). All 3 asymmetries were predicted under the transmission deficit hypothesis (D. G. MacKay & D. M. Burke, 1990) but contradict theories such as general slowing that cannot explain why aging affects some types of information processing more than others.     

Seeing pink elephants: fourteen-month-olds' interpretations of novel nouns and adjectives.

Words from different grammatical categories (e.g., nouns and adjectives) highlight different aspects of the same objects (e.g., object categories and object properties). Two experiments examine the acquisition of this phenomenon in 14-month-olds, asking whether infants can construe the very same set of objects (e.g., four purple animals) either as members of an object category (e.g., animals) or as embodying a salient object property (e.g., four purple things) and whether naming (with either count nouns or adjectives) influences infants' construals. Results suggest (1) that infants have begun to distinguish count nouns from adjectives, (2) that infants share with mature language-users an expectation that different grammatical forms highlight different aspects, and (3) that infants recruit these expectations when extending novel words. Further, these results suggest that an expectation linking count nouns to object categories emerges early in acquisition and supports the emergence of other word-to-world mappings.     

Monitoring syllable boundaries during speech production

This study investigated the encoding of syllable boundary information during speech production in Dutch. Based on Levelt's model of phonological encoding, we hypothesized segments and syllable boundaries to be encoded in an incremental way. In a self-monitoring experiment, decisions about the syllable affiliation (first or second syllable) of a pre-specified consonant, which was the third phoneme in a word, were required (e.g., ka.No 'canoe' vs. kaN.sel 'pulpit'; capital letters indicate pivotal consonants, dots mark syllable boundaries). First syllable responses were faster than second syllable responses, indicating the incremental nature of segmental encoding and syllabification during speech production planning. The results of the experiment are discussed in the context of Levelt's model of phonological encoding.     

Phoneme errors in Broca's aphasia: three Finnish cases

The phonemic errors of three Finnish Broca's aphasics were analyzed according to various phonological features, frequency of segments, syllable, word, and stress positions, as well as for the phonotactic structure of the uncanonical products. It was found, e.g., that the distance between the syntagmatic error and its source could not be satisfactorily counted by phonemes, since the syllable had to be taken into account also in pathological Finnish. As regards the paradigmatic dimension of the errors, the number of incorrect features is even here in reverse relation to the frequency of the erroneous phonemes. Moreover, it was found that pure quantity errors and vowel harmony deviations are infrequent in the speech of Finnish Broca's aphasics.     

Listeners learn phonotactic patterns conditioned on suprasegmental cues

Language learners are sensitive to phonotactic patterns from an early age, and can acquire both simple and 2nd-order positional restrictions contingent on segment identity (e.g., /f/ is an onset with /æ/but a coda with /?/). The present study explored the learning of phonototactic patterns conditioned on a suprasegmental cue: lexical stress. Adults first heard non-words in which trochaic and iambic items had different consonant restrictions. In Experiment 1, participants trained with phonotactic patterns involving natural classes of consonants later falsely recognized novel items that were consistent with the training patterns (legal items), demonstrating that they had learned the stress-conditioned phonotactic patterns. However, this was only true for iambic items. In Experiment 2, participants completed a forced-choice test between novel legal and novel illegal items and were again successful only for the iambic items. Experiment 3 demonstrated learning for trochaic items when they were presented alone. Finally, in Experiment 4, in which the training phase was lengthened, participants successfully learned both sets of phonotactic patterns. These experiments provide evidence that learners consider more global phonological properties in the computation of phonotactic patterns, and that learners can acquire multiple sets of patterns simultaneously, even contradictory ones.     

Listeners’ perception of compensatory shortening

English exhibits compensatory shortening, whereby a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable is measured to be shorter than the same stressed syllable alone. This anticipatory shortening is much greater than backward shortening, whereby an unstressed syllable is measured to shorten a following stressed syllable. We speculated that measured shortening reflects not true shortening, but coarticulatory hiding. Hence, we asked whether listeners are sensitive to parts of stressed syllables hidden by following or preceding unstressed syllables. In two experiments (Experiments 1A and 1B), we found the point of subjective equality—that is, the durational difference between a stressed syllable in isolation and one followed by an unstressed syllable—at which listeners cannot tell which is longer. In a third experiment (Experiment 2), we found the point of subjective equality for stressed monosyllables and disyllables with a weak-strong stress pattern. In all of the experiments, the points of subjective equality occurred when stressed syllables in disyllables were measured to be shorter than those in monosyllables, as if the listeners heard the coarticulatory onset or the continuation of a stressed syllable within unstressed syllables.     

Orthographic structure and deaf spelling errors: Syllables, letter frequency, and speech

Syllable structure influences hearing students' reading and spelling (e.g., Badecker, 1996; Caramazza & Miceli, 1990; Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986; Rapp, 1992; Treiman & Zukowski, 1988). This may seem unsurprising since hearers closely associate written and spoken words. We analysed a corpus of spelling errors made by deaf students. They would have learned English orthography with an attenuated experience of speech. Wefound that the majority of their errors were phonologically implausible but orthographically legal. A tendency to replace uncommon letter sequences with common sequences could not account for this pattern, nor could residual influence from speech. Since syllabically defined constraints are required to keep sequences orthographically legal, the deaf data are marked by an influence of syllable structure. Two main conclusions follow: (1) Our results contribute to evidence that abstract constraints, not derived from peripheral speech or hearing mechanisms, govern the organization of linguistic knowledge; and (2) statistical redundancy could not explain the deaf results. It does not offer a general alternative to suprasegmental structure.     

Phonotactic regularities in the segmentation of spoken Italian

Five word-spotting experiments explored the role of consonantal and vocalic phonotactic cues in the segmentation of spoken Italian. The first set of experiments tested listeners’ sensitivity to phonotactic constraints cueing syllable boundaries. Participants were slower in spotting words in nonsense strings when target onsets were misaligned (e.g., lago in ri.blago) than when they were aligned (e.g., lago in rin.lago) with phonotactically determined syllabic boundaries. This effect held also for sequences that occur only word-medially (e.g., /tl/ in ri.tlago), and competition effects could not account for the disadvantage in the misaligned condition. Similarly, target detections were slower when their offsets were misaligned (e.g., cittá in cittáu.ba) than when they were aligned (e.g., cittá in cittá.oba) with a phonotactic syllabic boundary. The second set of experiments tested listeners’ sensitivity to phonotactic cues, which specifically signal lexical (and not just syllable) boundaries. Results corroborate the role of syllabic information in speech segmentation and suggest that Italian listeners make little use of additional phonotactic information that specifically cues word boundaries.