One hypothesis raised by Newport and Aslin to explain how speakers learn dependencies between nonadjacent phonemes is that speakers track bigram probabilities between two segments that are adjacent to each other within a tier of their own. The hypothesis predicts that a dependency between segments separated from each other at the tier level cannot…

The study by Tamburelli, Jones, Gobet, and Pine (2012; henceforth TJGP) is a very welcome addition to the body of work concerning nonword repetition in typical development. TJGP go beyond previous work in considering three syllabic positions--onset, nucleus, and coda--with the aim of investigating how the positional role of phonemes within the…

Nonword repetition tasks (NWRTs) are employed widely in various studies on language development and are often relied upon as diagnostic tools. However, the mechanisms that underlie children's performance in NWRTs are very little understood. In this paper we present NWRT data from typically developing 5- to 6-year-olds (5:4-6:8) and examine the…

The study assessed the eye movements of 60 adult German readers during silent reading of target words, consisting of two and three syllables, embedded in sentences. The first objective was to assess whether the inhibitory effect of first syllable frequency, which was up to now primarily shown for isolated words, generalises to natural reading. The…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

In the current paper, we asked at what level in the speech planning process speakers retrieve stored syllables. There is evidence that syllable structure plays an essential role in the phonological encoding of words (e.g., online syllabification and phonological word formation). There is also evidence that syllables are retrieved as whole units.…

Speaking a word can be started faster when all the words in a given block share the initial portion (e.g., syllable) than when they do not (known as the form preparation effect). Two experiments employed the task to examine the role of morphemes in Chinese word production. In Experiment 1, the disyllabic target words were monomorphemic or…

In psycholinguistic research, there is still considerable debate about whether the type or token count of the frequency of a particular unit of language better predicts word recognition performance. The present study extends this distinction of type and token measures to the investigation of possible causes underlying syllable frequency effects.…

This commentary on a research study by Santiago et al. (2000) suggests that a reanalysis of the data that takes word length into account leads to a conclusion that is the opposite of what the study found. (Author/VWL)

Responds to a commentary written in response a research study conducted by the author (Santiago et al., 2000) that suggests that a reanalysis of the data on syllable structure effects that takes word length into account leads to a conclusion that is the opposite of what the study found. (Author/VWL)

Two eye movement experiments investigated the nature of the phonological representations used in reading English. Each tested whether sublexical, syllable information is part of that representation. Target words with CV-initial syllables (DE.MAND) or CVC-initial syllables (LAN.TERN) were preceded by primes that exactly matched or mismatched their…

This research used a copying task to study spelling acquisition from a perception and action perspective. First to fifth graders copied words and pseudo-words on a digitiser. Simultaneously, a camera registered the children's gaze lifts. First and second graders copied the first syllable and then produced a gaze lift to obtain information on the…

Four experiments were carried out to examine phonological priming effects on bisyllabic target words. In the first two, monosyllabic word and pseudoword primes facilitated lexical decisions to auditorily presented bisyllabic words. The second replicated the initial-overlap effect for monosyllabic word primes using a crossmodal method. In the…

In two experiments, French speakers detected CV or CVC sequences at the beginning of dysyllabic pseudowords varying in syllable structure and pivotal consonant. 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. (Author/VWL)

Argues that phonemes play a central role in speech recognition. Presents simulations showing how the recognition of nonsense syllables can be very well predicted from the recognition of their component phonemes. Suggests that a model in which syllables are factored into their phonemes can account for the results of multidimensional phonetic…