All humans are equipped with perceptual and articulatory mechanisms which (in healthy humans)
allow them to learn to perceive and produce speech. One basic question in psycholinguistics is
whether humans share similar underlying processing mechanisms for all languages or whether
these are fundamentally different due to the diversity of languages and speakers. This book
provides a cross-linguistic examination of speech comprehension by investigating word
recognition in users of different languages. The focus is on how listeners segment the
quasi-continuous stream of sounds that they hear into a sequence of discrete words and how a
universal segmentation principle the Possible Word Constraint applies in the recognition of
Slovak and German.
