Arguments for a Nonsegmental View

Systematic acoustic variation reflects vocal tract dynamics; it provides the acoustic coherence that makes a signal sound like speech. It is thus basic to speech perception, defined as lexical access. Implications of this argument are that the perceptual system maps an informationallyrich signal directly onto lexical forms that are structurally rich, and that phonemes are not essential for lexical access. Some properties of such a view of speech perception are discussed.