The Role of Syllable Structure in Lexical Segmentation: Helping Listeners Avoid Mondegreens

One challenge for theories of word recognition is to determine how the listener recovers the intended lexical segmentation in continuous speech. We argue that syllable structure provides one source of constraint on lexical segmentation and more precisely, that syllable onsets constitute potential alignment points for the mapping process. We present an overview of several studies using explicit syllable segmentation tasks, word spotting and crossmodal priming, which support the hypothesis.