How to hit Scylla without avoiding Charybdis: comment on Perruchet, Tyler, Galland, and Peereman (2004)

Abstract

M. Peña, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler argued that humans compute nonadjacent statistical relations among syllables in a continuous artificial speech stream to extract words, but they use other computations to determine the structural properties of words. Instead, when participants are familiarized with a segmented stream, structural generalizations about words are quickly established. P. Perruchet, M. D. Tyler, N. Galland, and R. Peereman criticized M. Peña et al.'s work and dismissed their results. In this article, the authors show that P. Perruchet et al.'s criticisms are groundless.