In normal speech, words and phonemes tend to overlap one another so that the sentence we are trying to interpret is nothing more than a long string of syllables without any pauses. In cases such as these, how are we able to understand the content of the sentence?
A) We hazard a guess as to where the breaks in the sentence should be.
B) We keep a mental record of which syllables occur right next to each other with unusual frequency.
C) We wait until the entire speech passage is finished and then try to decode the sentence.
D) We work through the speech passage on a trial-and-error basis as the passage occurs.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

We keep a mental record of which syllables occur right next to each other with unusual frequency. This ability helps us parse continuous speech into recognizable words and phrases, despite the lack of clear pauses.

In Normal Speech, Words and Phonemes Tend to Overlap One