ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to expand and replicate the findings of Wheeldon and Levelt (1995). They employed an internal speech monitoring task which required Dutch speakers to monitor silently generated words for target syllable or phoneme sequences. On the basis of the obtained data several claims were made concerning the locus, time-course and nature of the internal speech code. The series of experiments reported here examined these predictions using English stimuli. In contrast to the Dutch study, no evidence of any reaction time advantage to syllable over nonsyllable strings was found. A phoneme monitoring experiment replicated the left-to-right pattern of results observed by Wheeldon and Levelt. In addition, a perception version of the task failed to replicate these effects suggesting that they were independent of the position of the target in the speech stream. Implications of the results in terms of the time course of phonological encoding are discussed.
