For understanding speech listeners spontaneously use a strategy that segments the speech stream into units. Recent work based on English suggests that speech segmentation is triggered by strong syllables. This was shown by a paradigm in which word boundary misperceptions were elicited in a task in which English native speakers listened to faintly audible fragments of sentences. In the present study we examined whether similar processing strategies can be observed for Dutch native speakers using the same paradigm. The results for Dutch are as predicted by the Metrical Segmentation Strategy.

Keywords: speech perception, stress, segmentation strategy