Abstract:
There is evidence that the human listener takes, in continuous speech, the onset of a syllable as the onset of a spoken word [J. Vroomen and B. de Gelder, J. Exp. Psychol.: Human Percept. Performance (in press)]. However, this syllabic strategy would fail in resyllabified words like ``my bike is,'' pronounced as /mai bai kis/. In the present study, a phoneme monitoring task is used to investigate whether resyllabified phonemes are more difficult to detect than their nonresyllabified counterpart. The results show that (i) nonresyllabified phonemes can be detected faster than resyllabified phonemes, and (ii) that this effect is bigger for words that are not unique at their offset. This suggests that, in particular, late-unique resyllabified words should be more difficult to perceive, and it lends further credence to the idea that a syllable onset is taken as the onset of a word.