Why phonological constraints are so coarse-grained

INTRODUCTION Current models of speech perception are divided with regard to the status of "phonology", or general implicit knowledge of the sound patterns of a language. In the TRACE model (McClelland & Elman, 1986) the phonotactic and prosodic constraints of phonology are treated as epiphenomenal from regularities in the lexicon. In contrast, Norris (1994), Vitevich and Luce (1998) and MERGE (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2000) respond to a growing body of experimental literature indicating that low-level encoding of the speech signal (the level whose result is passed up to the lexicon for potential word matches) is sensitive to phonotactic and prosodic constraints. Here, I will explore the consequences of the assumption that the architecture of the speech perception system includes a fast phonological preprocessor (hereafter, an FPP) which uses language-specific, but still general, prosodic and phonotactic patterns to chunk the speech stream on its way up to the lexical network