Volume 27, Issue 4

The unitary hypothesis of sentence perception implies a decoding process wherein listeners anticipate or confirm lexical units according to received syntactic information. A test of this hypothesis was made by constructing sentences which biased subjects to misinterpret the word boundaries of certain words making items subsequent and prior to this word meaningless. All material was presented by audio tape and read without phonetic bias (experiment 1) and with phonetic bias uncontrolled (experiment 2). Immediate recall scores were depressed relative to an appropriate control group (more so for experiment 1 than experiment 2) offering support for the unitary perception hypothesis.

Bundles of distinctive features (phonemes) are classified as more or less strongly marked, depending on their commonness in the languages of the world. In the voice correlation, /g γ\ are marked, /b v/ unmarked in the voiced series. In the voiceless series, /p f/ are marked, /k x/ unmarked. Among the dental fricatives, /Θ ð/ are more strongly marked than /s z/. The existence of /p g/ implies redundancy of /f γ and inversely.