Syllables in the processing of spoken Italian

Five experiments explored the role of the syllable in the processing of spoken Italian. According to the syllabic hypothesis, the sublexical unit used by speakers of Romance languages to segment speech and access the lexicon is the syllable. However, languages with different degrees of acoustic-phonetic transparency give rise to syllabic effects that vary in robustness. It follows from this account that speakers of phonologically similar languages should behave in a similar way. By exploiting the similarities between Spanish and Italian, the authors tested this prediction in Experiments 1-4. Indeed, Italian listeners were found to produce syllabic effects similar to those observed in Spanish listeners. In Experiment 5, the predictions of the syllabic hypothesis with respect to lexical access were tested. The results corroborated these predictions. The findings are discussed in relation to current models of speech processing.