Brain and Language 81, 144–161 (2002) doi:10.1006/brln.2001.2513, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on The Role of the Syllable in Lexical Segmentation in French: Word-Spotting Data Nicolas Dumay,* , ² Uli H. Frauenfelder,‡ and Alain Content* , ‡ *Laboratoire de Psychologie Expe ´rimentale, Universite ´ libre de Bruxelles, and ²Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, Belgium; and ‡Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique Expe ´rimentale, Universite ´ de Gene `ve, Geneva, Switzerland Published online December 27, 2001 Three word-spotting experiments assessed the role of syllable onsets and offsets in lexical segmentation. Participants detected CVC words embedded initially or finally in bisyllabic nonwords with aligned (CVC.CVC) or misaligned (CV.CCVC) syllabic structure. A misalign- ment between word and syllable onsets (Experiment 1) produced a greater perceptual cost than a misalignment between word and syllable offsets (Experiments 2 and 3). These results suggest that listeners rely on syllable onsets to locate the beginning of words. The implications for theories of lexical access in continuous speech are discussed.  2001 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: syllable; spoken word recognition; lexical segmentation; word-spotting. The intuition that speech comes in syllables is probably universal and as ancient as the very beginnings of human thinking about language. Even though the introduc- tion of the notion into phonology is relatively recent, the syllable is now generally considered a fundamental unit in modern accounts of many aspects of language be- havior. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, despite the large amount of research that the syllable has generated and its ubiquitous appearance in linguistic and psycholinguistic theorizing, the exact role of syllables in the perception of speech and word recognition in continuous speech is still far from clear. Early research into the role of the syllable in speech recognition focused on the question of its psychological reality as a ‘‘perceptual unit’’ (e.g., Savin & Bever, 1970). However, it has since appeared that this question was too vague and needed to be refined. One step in this direction was to distinguish between two fundamental functions of the perceptual mechanisms involved in speech processing (e.g., Norris & Cutler, 1985). One of these functions, that of classification, must deal with the lack of invariance of speech and involves assigning time-varying stretches of input onto some mental categories serving as intermediate representations in the lexical mapping The work reported herein was supported by grants from the Direction Ge ´ne ´rale de la Recherche Sci- entifique—Communaute ´ franc ¸aise de Belgique (A.R.C. 96/01-203) and from the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research (Projects 1113-049698.96 and 1114-059532.99). It was carried out while the first author was research assistant of the National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium). We thank David Ott for his voice; Marie-He ´le `ne Banel for her help in testing participants; and Anne Cutler, Gareth Gaskell, James McQueen, Christophe Pallier, and two anonymous reviewers for fruitful comments or discussions. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Nicolas Dumay, Psycholinguistic Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Fax: 44 1904 433181. E-mail: n.dumay@psych.york.ac.uk. 144 0093-934X/01 $35.00  2001 Elsevier Science (USA) All rights reserved.