Segmentation of spoken language by normal adult listeners

![CDATA[Listening to spoken language usually seems effortless, but the processes involved are complex. A continuous acoustic signal must be translated into meaning so that the listener can understand the speaker's intent. The mapping of sound to meaning proceeds via the lexicon-our store of known words. Any utterance we hear may be novel to us, but the words it contains are familiar, and to understand the utterance we must therefore identify the words of which it is composed. We know a great many words; an educated adult's vocabulary has been estimated at around 150,000 words. Entries in the mental lexicon may include, besides standalone words, grammatical morphemes such as prefixes and suffixes and multiword phrases such as idioms and cliches. Languages also differ widely in how they construct word forms, and this too will affect what is stored in the lexicon. But in any language, listening involves mapping the acoustic signal onto stored meanings.]]