The Syllable’s Role in the Segmentation of Stress Languages

THE " SYLLABLE EFFECT " If French listeners are asked to detect, as rapidly as possible, the phonologica l fragment ba-in a series of spoken words, they respond faster to the word balance than to balcon; conversely, the target bal-is detected more rapidly in balcon than in balance. Syllable boundaries in French are clear: The rst syllable of balance is ba-and the rst syllable of balcon is bal-. Thus listeners consistently respond faster to targets which correspond precisely to the initial syllable of a word. This " syllable effect " discovered by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder and Segui (1981) has prompted (so far!) a decade and a half of follow-up work (Frauenfelder & Kearns, 1996). The nding is important because it suggests a mechanism by which listeners can attack the problem of continuity of spoken utterances: Clear cues to where words begin and end are rare, but listeners can only understand utterances by decomposing (i.e. segmenting) them into the individual words of which they are made up. Restricting the possible points at which words might conceivably begin to the set of detected syllable boundaries would simplify this segmentation problem. Syllable effects are extremely robust in experiments with French listeners. They appear in the fragment detection task as described above not only with native materials, but also with materials in non-native languages, such as