Elsa Spinelli

Processing resyllabified words in French

Abstract In French, the final [ ] of dernier is not pronounced in dernier train (last train), but is pronounced, in the following syllable, in a liaison environment like dernier oignon (last onion). Due to liaison, dernier oignon becomes homophonous with dernier rognon (last kidney). In four pairs of cross-modal priming experiments, French participants made visual lexical decisions to vowel- or consonant-initial targets (e.g., oignon , rognon ) following both versions of spoken sentences like C’est le dernier oignon / rognon . Facilitation was found for both types of target when targets matched the speaker’s intended segmentation, but was weaker when they mismatched the intended segmentation. In unambiguous sentences there was facilitation only for targets matching the speaker’s intentions. The consonants in the liaison environments were shorter than the word-initial consonants (e.g., [ ] in dernier oignon vs. rognon ). Word recognition therefore appears to be influenced by subphonemic cues to the words that speakers intend.

Masked Repetition and Phonological Priming Within and Across Modalities

Lexical decision latencies to word targets presented either visually or auditorily were faster when directly preceded by a briefly presented (53-ms) pattern-masked visual prime that was the same word as the target (repetition primes), compared with different word primes. Primes that were pseudohomophones of target words did not significantly influence target processing compared with unrelated primes (Experiments 1-2) but did produce robust priming effects with slightly longer prime exposures (67 ms) in Experiment 3. Like repetition priming, these pseudohomophone priming effects did not interact with target modality. Experiments 4 and 5 replicated this general pattern of effects while introducing a different measure of prime visibility and an orthographic priming condition. Results are interpreted within the framework of a bimodal interactive activation model.

Perception of resyllabification in French.

MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, England In three experiments, we examined the effects of phonological resyllabification processes on the perception of French speech. Enchainment involves the resyllabification of a word-final consonant across a syllable boundary (e.g., inchaque avion, the /k/ crosses the syllable boundary to become syllableinitial). Liaison involves a further process of realization of alatent consonant, alongside resyllabification (e.g., the /t/ inpetit avion). If the syllable is a dominant unit of perception in French (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Segui, 1981), these processes should cause problems for recognition of the following word. A cross-modal priming experiment showed no cost attached to either type of resyllabification in terms of reduced activation of the following word. Furthermore, word- and sequencemonitoring experiments again showed no cost and suggested that the recognition of vowel-initial words may be facilitated when they are preceded by a word that had undergone resyllabification through enchainment or liaison. We examine the sources of information that could underpin facilitation and propose a refinement of the syllable’s role in the perception of French speech.

Processing complex graphemes in handwriting production

Recent studies on handwriting production and neuropsychological data have suggested that orthographic representations are multilevel structures that encode information on letter identity and order, but also on intermediate-grained processing units such as syllables and morphemes. This study on handwriting production examined whether orthographic representations also include a graphemic-processing level. French adults wrote words containing an embedded one-, two-, or three-letter grapheme (e.g., a in clavier, ai in prairie, ain in plainte) on a digitizer. The results for letter duration revealed that the timing of movement processing depends on grapheme length (e.g., the duration of a for one-letter graphemes was shorter than that for two-letter graphemes, which, in turn, was shorter than that for three-letter graphemes). Two- and three-letter graphemes start to be processed before we start to write them. The results therefore revealed that orthographic representations also encode information on grapheme complexity.

An intonational cue to word segmentation in phonemically identical sequences.

We investigated the use of language-specific intonational cues to word segmentation in French. Participants listened to phonemically identical sequences such as /selafij/, C’est la fiche/l’affiche “It’s the sheet/poster.” We modified the f0 of the first vowel /a/ of the natural consonant-initial production la fiche, so that it was equal to that of the natural vowel-initial production l’affiche (resynth-consonant-equal condition), higher (resynthconsonant-higher condition), or lower (resynth-consonant-lower condition). In a two-alternative forced choice task (Experiment 1), increasing the f 0 in the /a/ of la fiche increased the percentage of vowel-initial (affiche) responses. In Experiment 2, participants made visual lexical decisions to vowel-initial targets (affiche) following both the natural consonant-initial production (la fiche) and the resynth-consonant-equal version. Facilitation was found only for the resynth-consonant-equal condition, suggesting that raising the f 0 allowed online activation of vowel-initial targets. The recognition system seems to exploit intonational information to guide segmentation toward the beginning of content words.

Processing prefixes and suffixes in handwriting production.

Previous research showed that handwriting production is mediated by linguistically oriented processing units such as syllables and graphemes. The goal of this study was to investigate whether French adults also activate another kind of unit that is more related to semantics than phonology, namely morphemes. Experiment 1 revealed that letter duration and inter-letter intervals were longer for suffixed words than for pseudo-suffixed words. These results suggest that the handwriting production system chunks the letter components of the root and suffix into morpheme-sized units. Experiment 2 compared the production of prefixed and pseudo-prefixed words. The results did not yield significant differences. This asymmetry between suffix and prefix processing has also been observed in other linguistic tasks. In suffixed words, the suffix would be processed on-line during the production of the root, in an analytic fashion. Prefixed words, in contrast, seem to be processed without decomposition, as pseudo-affixed words.

Seeing the initial articulatory gestures of a word triggers lexical access

When the auditory information is deteriorated by noise in a conversation, watching the face of a speaker enhances speech intelligibility. Recent findings indicate that decoding the facial movements of a speaker accelerates word recognition. The objective of this study was to provide evidence that the mere presentation of the first two phonemes—that is, the articulatory gestures of the initial syllable—is enough visual information to activate a lexical unit and initiate the lexical access process. We used a priming paradigm combined with a lexical decision task. The primes were syllables that either shared the initial syllable with an auditory target or not. In Experiment 1, the primes were displayed in audiovisual, auditory-only or visual-only conditions. There was a priming effect in all conditions. Experiment 2 investigated the locus (prelexical vs. lexical or postlexical) of the facilitation effect observed in the visual-only condition by manipulating the targets word frequency. The facilitation produced by the visual prime was significant for low-frequency words but not for high-frequency words, indicating that the locus of the effect is not prelexical. This suggests that visual speech mostly contributes to the word recognition process when lexical access is difficult.

Audiovisual vowel monitoring and the word superiority effect in children

The goal of this study was to explore whether viewing the speaker’s articulatory gestures contributes to lexical access in children (ages 5–10) and in adults. We conducted a vowel monitoring task with words and pseudo-words in audio-only (AO) and audiovisual (AV) contexts with white noise masking the acoustic signal. The results indicated that children clearly benefited from visual speech from age 6–7 onwards. However, unlike adults, the word superiority effect was not greater in the AV than the AO condition in children, suggesting that visual speech mostly contributes to phonemic—rather than lexical—processing during childhood, at least until the age of 10.

Graphemic cohesion effect in reading and writing complex graphemes

AU /o/ and AN // in French are both complex graphemes, but they vary in their strength of association to their respective sounds. The letter sequence AU is systematically associated to the phoneme /o/, and as such is always parsed as a complex grapheme. However, AN can be associated with either one phoneme (/A)/ in e.g., CRAN /kR/ “notch”) and be parsed as a complex grapheme; or with two phonemes (/an/ in e.g., CANE /kan/ “duck”), thus being parsed as two simple graphemes. As a consequence, AU would be a more cohesive grapheme than AN, for which there is a parsing ambiguity. We examined whether the reading and writing systems take into account this potential parsing ambiguity due to the graphemes’ degree of cohesion when processing complex graphemes. Experiment 1 consisted of a letter detection task. The participants had to detect, for example A in strongly cohesive complex graphemes (e.g., AU /o/) or weakly cohesive complex graphemes (e.g., AN //). A was detected faster in weakly cohesive complex graphemes than in strongly cohesive ones. In a handwriting task (Experiment 2) we found that weakly cohesive complex graphemes (e.g., ON) yielded longer programming times than strongly cohesive ones (e.g., OU), suggesting that the handwriting system also takes into account the potential decomposability of the complex graphemes into either one (ON //) or two (O+N /on/) units. Overall, our results show an effect of parsing ambiguity due to graphemic cohesion of complex graphemes; these results should be accounted for by current models of written word processing and spelling.

English Listeners’ Use of Distributional and Acoustic-Phonetic Cues to Liaison in French: Evidence from Eye Movements

This study investigates English listeners’ use of distributional and acoustic-phonetic cues to liaison in French. Liaison creates a misalignment of the syllable and word boundaries, but is signaled by distributional cues (/z/ is a frequent liaison but not a frequent word onset; /t/ is a frequent word onset but a less frequent liaison) and acoustic-phonetic cues (liaison consonants are 15 per cent shorter than word-initial consonants). English-speaking French learners completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which they heard adjective-noun sequences where the pivotal consonant was /t/ (expected advantage for consonant-initial words) or /z/ (expected advantage for liaison-initial words). Their results were compared to those of native French speakers. Both groups showed an advantage for consonant-initial targets with /t/ but no advantage for consonant- or liaison-initial targets with /z/. Both groups’ competitor fixations were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant, but only the learners’ fixations to liaison-initial targets were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant. This suggests that English listeners use both top-down (distributional) and bottom-up (acoustic-phonetic) cues to liaison in French. Their greater reliance on acoustic-phonetic cues is hypothesized to stem in part from English, where such cues play an important role for locating word boundaries.