In this study a monitoring technique was employed to examine the role of the syllable in the perceptual segmentation of words. Pairs of words sharing the first three phonemes but having different syllabic structure (for instance, pa-lace and pal-mier) were used. The targets were the sequences composed of either the first two or three phonemes of the word (for instance, pa andpal). The results showed that reaction times to targets which correspond to the first syllable of the word were faster than those that did not, independently of the target size. In a second experiment, two target types, V and VC (for instance, a and al in the two target words above) were used with the same experimental list as in experiment one. Subjects detected the VC target type faster when it belonged to the first syllable than when it belonged to the first two syllables. No differences were observed for the V target type which was in the first syllable in both cases. On the basis of the reported results an interpretation in which the syllable is considered a processing unit in speech perception is advanced.

We report the results of a large-scale picture naming experiment in which we evaluated the potential contribution of nine theoretically relevant factors to naming latencies. The experiment included a large number of items and a large sample of participants. In order to make this experiment as similar as possible to classicpicture naming experiments, participants were familiarizedwith the materialsduring a training session. Speeded naming latencies were determined by a software key on the basis of the digital recording of the responses. The effects of various variables on these latencies were assessed with multiple regression techniques, using a repeated measures design. The interpretation of the observed effects is discussed in relation to previous studies and current views on lexical access during speech production.

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject-verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of 'attraction' errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a word that is not the subject of the sentence). Experiment 1 (in Italian) shows that subject modifiers do not trigger attraction errors in free inverted VS (Verb Subject) structures, although attraction was found in VS interrogatives in English (Vigliocco, G., & Nicol, J. (1998). Separating hierarchical relations and word order in language production. Is proximity concord syntactic or linear? Cognition, 13-29) In Experiment 2 (in French), we report stronger attraction with preverbal clitic object pronouns than with subject modifiers. Experiment 3 (in French) shows that displaced direct objects in the cleft construction trigger attraction effects, in spite of the fact that the object does not intervene between the subject and the verb in the surface word order (OSV). Moreover, attraction is stronger in structures with subject-verb inversion (...). These observations are shown to be naturally interpretable through the tools of formal syntax, as elaborated within the Principles and Parameters/Minimalist tradition. Three important constructs are discussed: (1) the hierarchical representation of the sentence during syntactic construction, and the role of intermediate positions by which words transit when they move; (2) the role of specific hierarchical (c-command) but also linear (precedence) relations; and (3) complexity in agreement is presented which relates empirical evidence to these theoretical constructs. q

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Evidence is presented for a perceptual shift affecting consonant clusters that are phonotactically illegal, albeit pronounceable, in French. They are perceived as phonetically close legal clusters. Specifically, word-initial /dl/ and /tl/ are heard as /gl/ and /kl/, respectively. In 2 phonemic gating experiments, participants generally judged short gates-which did not yet contain information about the 2nd consonant t\l-as being dental stops. However, as information for the /!/ became available in larger gates, a perceptual shift developed in which the initial stops were increasingly judged to be velars. A final phoneme monitoring test suggested that this kind of shift took place on-line during speech processing and with some extratemporal processing cost. These results provide evidence for the automatic integration of low-level phonetic information into a more abstract code determined by the native phonological system.The view that speech perception is determined by the native-language sound system is well motivated and widely shared. Ontogenetically, there is a shift from universal to language-specific perceptual capacities: Although young infants seem to be initially equipped with "universal" capacities for processing speech sounds, language-specific capacities emerge in the second half of the first year of life, by 9 months or before