Cynthia M. Connine

Four experiments are reported that investigate processing of mispronounced words for which the phonological form is inconsistent with the graphemic form (words spelled with silent letters). Words produced as mispronunciations that are consistent with their spelling were more confusable with their citation form counterpart than mispronunciations that are inconsistent with their spelling in a same/different task. Cross-modal repetition priming for orthographically supported productions and their citation form counterparts was equivalent; in contrast, orthographically unsupported productions showed reduced priming relative to the citation form. The findings are discussed in light of models of cross-modal interaction between spoken and written lexical representations. We argue that the results support a restructuring model where reading promotes development of a phonological representation used during spoken word recognition.

Recognition of a spoken word phonological variant—schwa vowel deletion (e.g., corporate ? corp’rate)— was investigated in vowel detection (absent/present) and syllable number judgment (two or three...

Recognition of a frequently heard spoken word variant in American English (flapping) was investigated in a phoneme identification experiment. Listeners identified the initial segment ( b or p) of...

Vowel deletion is a phonological process in which an unstressed /∂/ (schwa) vowel is deleted during pronunciation. In Experiment 1, vowel-deleted and vowel-reduced versions of two- and three-syllable...

We consider the motivation for the principle of bottom-up priority and its consequence for information flow in Merge. The relationship between the bottom-up priority rule and inhibitory effects is also discussed, along with data that demonstrate inhibitory influences in phoneme monitoring.

Two experiments were conducted to examine which of two linguistic syllabification strategies, the maximal onset principle and the stress principle, is operative in auditory word recognition. Test stimuli consisted of bisyllabic words and nonwords containing two medial consonants, the second of which had a potential attachment to either the coda of the first syllable or the onset of the second syllable (e.g., MARKET). A phonological priming paradigm was used in which prime stimuli were artificially syllabified by inserting silence. In the critical conditions, the prime was consistent with the maximal onset principle (e.g., MAR-KET) or with the stress principle (e.g., MARK-ET). The results suggested that listeners prefer to attach a medial consonant to the onset of a syllable in a way that is characterized by the maximal onset principle. The results also indicate some use of the stress principle.