Phonological and morphological influences in the syllabification of spokenwords

Words appear to be stored in memory in syllabic units that adhere to the ph onology and morphology of the language (e.g., Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksle r, & Older, 1994: Treiman & Danis, 1988a). Three experiments investigated t he formation of the syllabic representation of words using the structural i nduction phoneme monitoring paradigm in which stimulus lists are disproport ionately weighted with words of one syllabic structure. In Experiment I, tw o phonological principles of syllabification were compared to determine ii one (maximum onset principle) might take precedence over the other (phonota ctic illegality) during the formation of the initial structural representat ion of a word. Results suggest that phonotactic legality overrides the maxi mum onset principle. In Experiments 2 and 3, phonological and morphological parsings were pitted against each other to determine whether morphological influences in syllabification could be found as early as phonological infl uences. Results demonstrated that phonology, not morphology, guided syllabi fication. Experiment 4 demonstrated that the null effects of morphology wer e likely due to the stage of processing being tapped by the induction parad igm, Findings suggest that the formation of syllabic structure is guided by phonology prior to morphology, (C) 1999 Academic Press.