3 groups of monolingual adult native speakers of English attempted to pronounce a non-English phone embedded in 1-, 4-, and 7-syllable phonological strings. The number of phonemic errors made increased with syllable complexity, with 1-syllable Ss showing quick sound recognition, native phoneme inhibition, and phonetic approximations of the target sound. String complexity causes selective attention to shift away from the phonetic detail of the stimulus to a phrasal level of analysis.
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