Attentional allocation to syllables in American English

Previous experimental studies in speech perception (e.g., Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui 1986) have concluded that the syllable is not a prelexical segmentation unit for English speakers. The set of experiments reported here applied the attentional phoneme monitoring task of Pallier, Sebastian-Galles, Felguera, Christophe, and Mehler (1993) to American English and demonstrated a robust effect of syllable structure when second-syllable stress words were used, but no such effect with first-syllable stress words. We hypothesize that aspects of syllable structure related to word stress are an important factor in the detection of syllabic effects in English. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.