@misc{cogprints751,
           title = {Phonemes and Syllables in Speech Perception: size of the attentional focus in French.},
          author = {Christophe Pallier},
       publisher = {University of Patras, Rion, Greece},
            year = {1997},
           pages = {2159--2162},
        keywords = {Psycholinguisics, unit of perception, speech, phoneme, syllable, attention, detection, reaction-times, phonological structure, segmentation},
             url = {http://cogprints.org/751/},
        abstract = {A study by Pitt and Samuel (1990) found that English speakers could narrowly focus attention onto a precise phonemic position inside spoken words [1]. This led the authors to argue that the phoneme, rather than the syllable, is the primary unit of speech perception. Other evidence, obtained with a syllable detection paradigm, has been put forward to propose that the syllable is the unit of perception; yet, these experiments were ran with French speakers [2]. In the present study, we adapted Pitt \& Samuel's phoneme detection experiment to French and found that French subjects behave exactly like English subjects: they too can focus attention on a precise phoneme. To explain both this result and the established sensitivity to the syllabic structure, we propose that the perceptual system automatically parses the speech signal into a syllabically-structured phonological representation.}
}

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