Abstract
Resyllabification is a phonological process in which consonants are attached to syllables other than those from which they originally came. In four experiments, we investigated whether resyllabified words, such as “mybike is” pronounced as “mai.bai.kis,” are more difficult to recognize than nonresyllabified words. Using a phoneme-monitoring task, we found that phonemes in resyllabified words were detected more slowly than those in nonresyllabified words. This difference increased when recognition of the carrier word was made more difficult. Acoustic differences between the target words themselves could not account for the results, because cross-splicing the resyllabified and nonresyllabified carrier words did not change the pattern. However, when nonwords were used as carriers, the effect disappeared. It is concluded that resyllabification increases the lexical-processing demands, which then interfere with phoneme monitoring.
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The research was partly supported by a grant from the Human Frontier of Science Program “Processing Consequences of Contrasting Language Phonologies.” The research of J. V. has been made possible by a fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Research was also partly supported by the Ministry of Education of the Belgian French-Speaking Community, Concerted Research Action “Language Processing in Different Modalities: Comparative Approaches.”
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Vroomen, J., De Gelder, B. Lexical access of resyllabified words: Evidence from phoneme monitoring. Memory & Cognition 27, 413–421 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211537
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211537