Previous research [Warren et al., Percept. Psychophys. 47, 423–432 (1990)] has shown that listeners presented with recylced sequences of steady‐state vowels hear illusory syllables and words rather than a succession of vowels. Often the signal is split perceptually into two simultaneous words differing in both timbre and phonemic content. The present study investigated the spectral composition of such dual organizations and found that it is possible to isolate for further study spectral bands corresponding to each word. When one such narrow band is presented to one ear and the broadband vowel sequence to the other, the narrow band word can be extraced from the lateralized broadband spectrum and heard at the medial plane. Under appropriate conditions, a monaural narrow band noise spanning the same frequency range as the narrow band word also can, through contralateral induction, excise the word from the broadband vowel sequence and move it to the medial plane. In contrast, it is not possible to delateralize a spectral segment of a recycled actual word under either of the conditions described above, indicating a weaker spectral cohesion for the broadband vowels. [Work supported by NIH and AFOSR.]