Monitoring internal speech: an advantage for syllables over phonemes?

Listeners generally detect syllables faster than phonemes in overt speech. This “syllable advantage” holds robustly for utterance-initial CV vs. C targets [Segui et al., 1981. Phoneme monitoring, syllable monitoring and lexical access. British Journal of Psychology, 72(4), 471–477]. We report a syllable advantage when monitoring inner speech. Spanish-speaking Argentinian participants presented with pictures were faster and more accurate at detecting CV than C targets at the beginning of the pictures’ names. This CV over C advantage maintained, although substantially weakened, after adding CV’ foils in CV-target trials, a manipulation logically more detrimental to CV- than C-detection. Our results converge with previous studies showing intriguing parallelisms between overt and inner speech perception and processing, supporting a restricted version of Levelt’s perceptual-loop hypothesis. We discuss what common basic units of processing could be, borrowing from the articulatory phonology framework and its proposal of a “common currency” between speakers and listeners.