The role of tone in Swedish speech segmentation

![CDATA[Introduction. In speech, there are no blank spaces to signal boundaries between words as there is in written language, but listeners can nevertheless recognise individual words rapidly. Without these blank spaces or commas, listeners have to divide up – segment – the continuous speech stream into discrete words using other means. This study aimed to investigate the tonal cues important for speech segmentation in Swedish. We know that that different languages use different cues in speech segmentation, such as stress (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 1995), syllable weight (Cutler & Norris, 1988) and vowel harmony (Suomi, McQueen, & Cutler, 1997), but we do not yet know the extent to which phonological cues are used in speech segmentation. In English, stressed and metrically strong syllables are heard as more reliable word onsets, leading the parser to initiate a lexical access attempt at these points. Accurate segmentation is crucial since words can always be embedded in larger words, and these spurious embedded words are activated in memory (Luce & Cluff, 1998): the phrase start writing potentially includes star, trite, try, rye and so on (Cutler, 2012). However, no study has yet investigated speech segmentation in languages like Swedish, where prosody systematically combines with morphology. This will allow us to more fully understand universal drivers behind speech segmentation.]]