Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two types of word stimuli, easily syllabified (eg. balcony) and ambisyllabic English words (eg. balance), were used in a reading task designed to determine if words are processed using strictly syllables as the unit of segmentation or if multiple units of segmentation are used. W e could not replicate work done by Prinzmetal, Treiman, and Rho (1986) who found that, with text, more illusory conjunction occurred within syllables than across syllable boundaries. In contrast, our work supports the hypothesis that English is too complicated of a language to use only one segmenting unit. Thus, the pattern of results was dependent on the structure of the words themselves, with the ambisyllabic words being processed using phonemes and not syllables as the unit of segmentation.