Language-universal constraints on speech segmentation

Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) is a language-speciŽc or languageuniversal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and any likely location of a word boundary, as cued in the speech signal. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CVC syllable with a schwa, or a CV syllable with a lax vowel. Although neither of these syllable contexts is a possible lexical word in English, wordspotting in both contexts was easier than in a context consisting of a single consonant. Two control lexical-decision experiments showed that the wordspotting results reected the relative segmentation difŽculty of the words in different contexts. The PWC appears to be language-universa l rather than language-speciŽc.