Language-universal constraints on speech segmentation

Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possibl e-Word Constraint (PWC) is a language-specific or language-universal strate gy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses whi ch leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and any likely location of a word boundary, as cued in the speech signal. The exper iments examined cases where the residue was either a CVC syllable with a sc hwa, or a CV syllable with a lax vowel. Although neither of these syllable contexts is a possible lexical word in English, word-spotting in both conte xts was easier than in a context consisting of a single consonant. Two cont rol lexical-decision experiments showed that the word-spotting results refl ected the relative segmentation difficulty of the words in different contex ts. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific.