ABSTRACT
At first sight this process is obtuse. Why take a specification of a word’s phonology, decompose it, and then recompute it? The answer, Levelt et al. argue, lies in the observation that we do not speak word by word or morpheme by morpheme, but in syllables which do not necessarily respect word or morpheme boundaries. For example, “Hard answer” is produced as the syllables “har-dan-swer” (/hJ-dJn-sM/). This seemingly convoluted system is necessary to handle this process of resyllabification.
