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--- abstract: "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." altloc: - http://www.ehess.fr/centres/lscp/persons/pallier/articles.htm chapter: ~ commentary: ~ commref: ~ confdates: 22-25 September 1997 conference: EuroSpeech '97. 5th European Conference On Speech Communication and Technology. confloc: 'Rhodes - Greece' contact_email: ~ creators_id: [] creators_name: - family: Pallier given: Christophe honourific: '' lineage: '' date: 1997 date_type: published datestamp: 1998-10-19 department: ~ dir: disk0/00/00/07/51 edit_lock_since: ~ edit_lock_until: ~ edit_lock_user: ~ editors_id: [] editors_name: [] eprint_status: archive eprintid: 751 fileinfo: /style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png;/751/3/a0602.pdf full_text_status: public importid: ~ institution: ~ isbn: ~ ispublished: pub issn: ~ item_issues_comment: [] item_issues_count: 0 item_issues_description: [] item_issues_id: [] item_issues_reported_by: [] item_issues_resolved_by: [] item_issues_status: [] item_issues_timestamp: [] item_issues_type: [] keywords: 'Psycholinguisics, unit of perception, speech, phoneme, syllable, attention, detection, reaction-times, phonological structure, segmentation' lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:16 latitude: ~ longitude: ~ metadata_visibility: show note: ~ number: ~ pagerange: 2159-2162 pubdom: FALSE publication: ~ publisher: 'University of Patras, Rion, Greece' refereed: FALSE referencetext: ~ relation_type: [] relation_uri: [] reportno: ~ rev_number: 12 series: ~ source: ~ status_changed: 2007-09-12 16:34:00 subjects: - cog-psy - comp-sci-speech - ling-phono - psy-ling - psy-phys succeeds: ~ suggestions: ~ sword_depositor: ~ sword_slug: ~ thesistype: ~ title: 'Phonemes and Syllables in Speech Perception: size of the attentional focus in French.' type: confpaper userid: 406 volume: ~