Previous research has found that a speaker's native phonological system has a great influence on perception of another language. In three experiments, we tested the perception and representation of Mandarin phonological contrasts by Guangzhou Cantonese speakers, and compared their performance to that of native Mandarin speakers. Despite their rich…

In two eye-tracking experiments in Italian, we investigated how acoustic information and stored knowledge about lexical stress are used during the recognition of tri-syllabic spoken words. Experiment 1 showed that Italians use acoustic cues to a word's stress pattern rapidly in word recognition, but only for words with antepenultimate stress.…

In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that those errors in immediate serial recall (ISR) that are attributable to phonological confusability share a locus with segmental errors in normal speech production. In the first two experiments, speech errors were elicited in the repeated paced reading of six-letter lists. The errors mirrored the…

Theories of English phonology regard syllable onset patterns as irrelevant to the assignment of lexical stress. This paper describes three studies that challenge this position. Study 1 tested whether stress patterns on a large sample of disyllabic English words varied as a function of word onset. The incidence of trochaic stress increased…

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical…