Slips of the Ear and Word Boundaries
"Slips of the Ear are useful in providing insights into how listeners determine where word boundaries lie in connected speech. When listeners misplace boundaries, they tend to insert them between a weak syllable and a strong--suggesting that segmentation is influenced by the predominant SW (strong-weak) pattern which characterises English rhythm."
(John Field, Psycholinguistics: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2004)
"Because casual speech is a continuous stream, listeners have to segment the stream in some way in order to find phonological sequences to compare with words in their mental lexicon. Slips of the ear involving word boundaries suggest that listeners employ stressed syllables as aids in segmentation.
"In the simplest case of word boundary errors, all properties of the target utterance correspond with the perceived utterance except for the presence of word boundaries. A classic error of this type is:
acute back pain - a cute back pain