The way in which letters are assigned their position when recognizing a visually presented word was examined in three experiments using nonwords created by transposing the two medial consonants of a bisyllabic baseword (e.g., "nakpin," "semron"). The difficulty in responding to such "TL" nonwords in a lexical decision task was shown to be lower…

Two auditory priming experiments tested whether the effect of final phonological overlap relies on syllabic representations. Amount of shared phonemic information and syllabic status of the overlap between nonword primes and targets were varied orthogonally. In the related conditions, CV.CCVC items shared the last syllable (e.g., vi.klyd-p[image…

Endress and Mehler (2009) reported that when adult subjects are exposed to an unsegmented artificial language composed from trisyllabic words such as ABX, YBC, and AZC, they are unable to distinguish between these words and what they coined as the "phantom-word" ABC in a subsequent test. This suggests that statistical learning generates knowledge…

Theories of spoken production have not specifically addressed whether the phonemes of a word compete with each other for selection during phonological encoding (e.g., whether /t/ competes with /k/ in cat). Spoken production theories were evaluated and found to fall into three classes, theories positing (1) no competition, (2) competition among…

The processes and the cues determining the orthographic structure of polysyllabic words remain far from clear. In the present study, we investigated the role of letter category (consonant vs. vowels) in the perceptual organization of letter strings. In the syllabic counting task, participants were presented with written words matched for the…

Fluent speech does not contain obvious breaks to word boundaries, yet there are a number of cues that listeners can use to help them segment the speech stream. Most of these cues have been investigated in isolation from one another. In previous work, Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997) suggested that listeners use a Possible Word…

Prosodic patterning is a key structural element of spoken language. However, the potential role of prosodic awareness in the phonological difficulties that characterise children with developmental dyslexia has been little studied. Here we report the first longitudinal study of sensitivity to syllable stress in children with dyslexia, enabling the…

We investigated the mechanisms by which fillers, such as "uh" and "um", affect memory for discourse. Participants listened to and attempted to recall recorded passages adapted from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The type and location of interruptions were manipulated through digital splicing. In Experiment 1, we tested a processing time…

This study clarifies the involvement of short- and long-term memory in novel word-form learning, using the Hebb repetition paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants recalled sequences of visually presented syllables (e.g., "la"-"va"-"bu"-"sa"-"fa"-"ra"-"re"-"si"-"di"), with one particular (Hebb) sequence repeated on every third trial. Crucially,…

Introduction: The perception of syllable stress has not been widely studied in developmental dyslexia, despite strong evidence for auditory rhythmic perceptual difficulties. Here we investigate the hypothesis that perception of sound rise time is related to the perception of syllable stress in adults with developmental dyslexia. Methods: A…

When two consonants within an English word were transposed to create a nonword, difficulty in lexical decision responses to that nonword was revealed, most strongly when the coda of the first syllable was exchanged with the onset of the second (e.g., "nakpin" derived from "napkin"), but also when onsets were exchanged between syllables (e.g.,…

The visual word recognition literature has been dominated by the study of "monosyllabic" words in factorial experiments, computational models, and megastudies. However, it is not yet clear whether the behavioral effects reported for monosyllabic words generalize reliably to "multisyllabic" words. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to…

Three experiments investigated the role of distal (i.e., nonlocal) prosody in word segmentation and lexical processing. In Experiment 1, prosodic characteristics of the initial five syllables of eight-syllable sequences were manipulated; the final portions of these sequences were lexically ambiguous (e.g., "note bookworm", "notebook worm"). Distal…

Word-segmentation, that is, the extraction of words from fluent speech, is one of the first problems language learners have to master. It is generally believed that statistical processes, in particular those tracking "transitional probabilities" (TPs), are important to word-segmentation. However, there is evidence that word forms are stored in…

Four experiments investigated the novel issue of learning to accommodate the co-articulated nature of speech. Experiment 1 established a co-articulatory mismatch effect for a set of vowel-consonant (VC) syllables (reaction times were faster for co-articulation matching than for mismatching stimuli). A rhyme judgment training task on words…