Jean-Yves Dommergues

The syllable's role in speech segmentation

In this study a monitoring technique was employed to examine the role of the syllable in the perceptual segmentation of words. Pairs of words sharing the first three phonemes but having different syllabic structure (for instance, pa-lace and pal-mier) were used. The targets were the sequences composed of either the first two or three phonemes of the word (for instance, pa and pal). The results showed that reaction times to targets which correspond to the first syllable of the word were faster than those that did not, independently of the target size. In a second experiment, two target types, V and VC (for instance, a and al in the two target words above) were used with the same experimental list as in experiment one. Subjects detected the VC target type faster when it belonged to the first syllable than when it belonged to the first two syllables. No differences were observed for the V target type which was in the first syllable in both cases. On the basis of the reported results an interpretation in which the syllable is considered a processing unit in speech perception is advanced.

THE GENDER-MARKING EFFECT IN SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION

In this paper we examine whether the recognition of a spoken noun is affected by the gender marking—masculine or feminine—that is carried by a preceding word. In the first of two experiments, the gating paradigm was used to study the access of French nouns that were preceded by an appropriate gender marking, carried by an article, or preceded by no gender marking. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to make a lexical decision on the same material. A very strong facilitatory effect was found in both cases. The origin of the gender-marking effect is discussed, as well as the level of processing involved—lexical or syntactic.

Dialect Effects in Speech Perception: The Role of Vowel Duration in Parisian French and Swiss French

The current experiments examined how native Parisian French and native Swiss French listeners use vowel duration in perceiving the /ɔ/-/o/ contrast. In both Parisian and Swiss French /o/ is longer than /ɔ/, but the difference is relatively large in Swiss French and quite small in Parisian French. In Experiment 1 we found a parallel effect in perception. For native listeners of both dialects, the perceived best exemplars of /o/ were longer than those of /ɔ/. However, there was a substantial difference in best-exemplar duration for /ɔ/ and /o/ for Swiss French listeners, but only a small difference in best-exemplar duration for Parisian French listeners. In Experiment 2 we found that this precise pattern depended not only on the native dialect of the listeners, but also on whether the stimuli being judged had the detailed acoustic characteristics of the native dialect. These findings indicate that listeners use fine-grained information in the speech signal in a dialect-specific manner when mapping the acoustic signal onto vowel categories of their language.

Performance structures in the recall of sentences

Two experiments were conducted to ascertain whether subjects’ recall of sentences reflects more closely their surface structure, as Johnson (1965, 1969) and others have predicted, or their performance structure, as Grosjean, Grosjean, and Lane (1979) have proposed. The results clearly show that, as for pausing and parsing, transitional error probability (TEP) in the rote recall of sentences reflects the product of two, sometimes conflicting, demands on processing: the need to respect the linguistic surface structure of the sentence and the need to balance the length of the constituents. The structures obtained from TEPs were similar to those obtained from other tasks (pausing and parsing), showing that performance structures are not task specific. In addition, the presence of deletable elements in the sentences (such as adjectives and adverbs) was closely associated with high TEPs.

Dialect differences in the temporal characteristics of vowels: A comparison of standard (Parisian) and Swiss French

Earlier we reported a dialect difference in the use of temporal information for vowel perception: Native speakers of Swiss French used temporal as well as spectral information when identifying /o/ versus /ɔ/, whereas native speakers of standard (Parisian) French used only spectral information [J. L. Miller and F. Grosjean, Language Speech 40, 277–288 (1997)]. We interpreted this dialect difference in terms of the more prominent role that vowel duration plays overall in the phonological system of Swiss French compared to standard French. To investigate further the basis of the dialect effect, we have been measuring the duration of /o/ and /ɔ/ in monosyllabic words for native speakers of the two dialects. Our findings to date indicate a robust dialect effect in production: The duration difference between /o/ and /ɔ/ is substantially larger and more consistent in Swiss French than in standard French. Thus the perceptual dialect effect for /o/ and /ɔ/ we reported earlier reflects both a specific difference in...