Listeners of various languages tend to perceive an illusory vowel inside consonant clusters that are illegal in their native language. Here, we test whether this phenomenon arises after phoneme categorization or rather interacts with it. We assess the perception of illegal consonant clusters in native speakers of Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese,…

In British English, the phrase "Canada aided" can sound like "Canada raided" if the speaker links the two vowels at the word boundary with an intrusive /r/. There are subtle phonetic differences between an onset /r/ and an intrusive /r/, however. With cross-modal priming and eye-tracking, we examine how native British English listeners and…

This eye movement study investigated the use of two types of segmentation cues in processing long Finnish compounds. The cues were related to the vowel quality properties of the constituents and properties of the consonant starting the second constituent. In Finnish, front vowels never appear with back vowels in a lexeme, but different quality…