JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE 35, 893–909 (1996) ARTICLE NO. 0046 Attentional Allocation to Syllables in American English

1986) have concluded that the syllable is not a prelexical segmentation unit for English speakers. The set of experiments reported here applied the attentional phoneme monitoring task of Pallier, Sebastián-Gallés, Felguera, Christophe, and Mehler (1993) to American English and demonstrated a robust effect of syllable structure when second-syllable stress words were used, but no such effect with first-syllable stress words. We hypothesize that aspects of syllable structure related to word stress are an important factor in the detection of syllabic effects in English. q 1996 Academic Press, Inc. In order to access the mental lexicon and given phoneme in the speech stream highly comprehend spoken language, the speech variable depending on context (Liberman, stream must be segmented into meaningful Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, units such as words or morphemes. Processing 1967). In contrast, the inventory of syllables considerations have led to the hypothesis that in a language is necessarily larger than the the speech stream might be initially seg- number of phonemes (by orders of magnitude mented into smaller, pre-lexical representa- in languages with a complex syllable structure tional units which then serve as the basis for such as English). However, coarticulatory ef