Juncture detection

Abstract

The 'units-of-perception' hypothesis has led psycholinguists to concern themselves with units of classification rather than with the more important process of speech segmentation. This paper argues that segmentation rather than classification of the speech signal is the primary prelexical process in speech perception. We claim further that universal juncture detection processes alone can account for processing differences between French and English which might be otherwise taken as evidence that different secondary-level perceptual units are involved in the perception of different languages.