title: Phonemes and Syllables in Speech Perception: size of the attentional focus in French.
creator: Pallier, Christophe
subject: Cognitive Psychology
subject: Speech
subject: Phonology
subject: Psycholinguistics
subject: Psychophysics
description: A study by Pitt and Samuel (1990) found that English speakers could narrowly focus attention onto a precise phonemic position inside spoken words [1]. This led the authors to argue that the phoneme, rather than the syllable, is the primary unit of speech perception. Other evidence, obtained with a syllable detection paradigm, has been put forward to propose that the syllable is the unit of perception; yet, these experiments were ran with French speakers [2]. In the present study, we adapted Pitt & Samuel's phoneme detection experiment to French and found that French subjects behave exactly like English subjects: they too can focus attention on a precise phoneme. To explain both this result and the established sensitivity to the syllabic structure, we propose that the perceptual system automatically parses the speech signal into a syllabically-structured phonological representation.
publisher: University of Patras, Rion, Greece
date: 1997
type: Conference Paper
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: http://cogprints.org/751/3/a0602.pdf
identifier:   Pallier, Christophe  (1997) Phonemes and Syllables in Speech Perception: size of the attentional focus in French.  [Conference Paper]     
relation: http://cogprints.org/751/