Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper explores the composition of syllable structure in lexical representations. Data from auditory lexical decision experiments are presented which demonstrate that syllable structure is represented in the mental lexicon and that the effects of syllable suucture are separable from shared segmental overlap. The data also indicate that syllable representations correspond to a surface syllable rather than an abstract underlying syllable posited by some linguistic theories. These findings raise questions concerning the origin of syllable structure in lexical representations. A connectionist simulation utilizing the TIMIT data base shows that syllable-like structure may be induced from exposure to phonetic input. Taken together these results suggest that knowledge of surface syllable structure is actively used in understanding language and this knowledge may derive from a speaker's experience with language.