Two experiments examined the nature of the phonological representations used during visual word recognition. We tested whether a minimality constraint (R. Frost, 1998) limits the complexity of early representations to a simple string of phonemes. Alternatively, readers might activate elaborated representations that include prosodic syllable…

Although word stress has been hailed as a powerful speech-segmentation cue, the results of 5 cross-modal fragment priming experiments revealed limitations to stress-based segmentation. Specifically, the stress pattern of auditory primes failed to have any effect on the lexical decision latencies to related visual targets. A determining factor was…