1761: Spacing between Words Oct 10, 2019

Although a listener is able to break up words while listening, there are usually no spaces in the actual speech. There are two ways that this can be proven. The first is in the photo below which represents sound in speech, and as the arrows show, the sounds keep going one word to the next without pause. The sentence below reads "lexical segmentation i[s] sometimes really easy". The other way that this can be shown is through the fact that words are not the same in certain contexts. Consider how the [n] before a [p] in "in Paris" assimilates to an [m], just as it does in 'impossible' from the negating suffix 'in-'.

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