Constraining Models of Jacques Mehler , Lexical Access : The Onset of Emmanuel Dupoux , and Word Recognition Juan Segui

at many distinguished institutions may license the conclusion that continuous speech has no obvious cues that facilitate the segmentation process es. However , even if cues indicating boundaries or natural segments have not been found , it would be rash to claim that they cannot be found. The lexicon is acquired, and infants are provided with little information about words pronounced in isolation. They are mostly stimulated by continuous speech. Thus , if word boundaries were not available , the acquisition of a lexicon would be incredibly difficult , if not outright impossible. Unfortunately , studies in this domain are by and large not available. So let us take a step back and ask what is known about how adults access lexical information. It has classically been assumed that the segmentation of continuous speech into words is made possible by using the lexicon. Models of speech processing that maintain that perception is contingent on lexical access favor the view that the signal is matched against the lexicon without any prior segmentation. Segmentation is viewed in these models as a byproduct of lexical access. We correctly parse the sentence " The book is on the table " because bookiso is not a word. However , these kinds of procedures rapidly run into difficulties. For instance , barring allophonic variations , it may be argued that the phonological realization of the ortho-graphic strings booki and bookis can be interpreted as words. Moreover , these solutions are not appropriate for coping with frequent instances of phonetic and phonological ambiguity in natural languages , e. g. , Good candy came anyways. Good can decay many ways. Faced with such potential ambiguities, automatic recognition systems adopt two solutions. The first one is to have speakers segment their own speech by inserting pauses between words and / or syllables before the