Pierre A. Hallé

Morphological priming without morphological relationship

Semantic transparency is a crucial factor in the processing of morphologically complex words, but seems to have a different impact depending on experimental conditions and languages. In English, semantic transparency is necessary to produce morphological priming in cross-modal priming, but not as clearly so in masked priming. The available reports of priming effects for opaque prime-target pairs are not as clear-cut as to rule out an explanation in terms of orthographic overlap. Experiment 1 was set out to clarify that issue in French. The novel notion of “pseudo-derivation” we introduce proved useful to show that surface morphology alone can produce priming effects in masked priming. In contrast, pure orthographic overlap produces marginal inhibition. Experiment 2 used auditory-visual cross-modal priming and showed that only semantically transparent words facilitate the recognition of their base.

Identification and discrimination of Mandarin Chinese tones by Mandarin Chinese vs. French listeners

Previous work has not yielded clear conclusions about the categorical nature of perception of tone contrasts by native listeners of tone languages. We reopen this issue in a cross-linguistic study comparing Taiwan Mandarin and French listeners. We tested these listeners on three tone continua derived from natural Mandarin utterances within carrier sentences, created via a state-of-the-art pitch-scaling technique in which within-continuum interpolation was applied to both f0 and intensity contours. Classic assessments of categorization and discrimination of each tone continuum were conducted with both groups of listeners. In Experiment 1, Taiwanese listeners identified the tone of target syllables within carrier sentence context and discriminated tones of single syllables. In Experiment 2, both French and Taiwanese listeners completed an AXB identification task on single syllables. Finally, French listeners were run on an AXB discrimination task in Experiment 3. Results indicated that Taiwanese listeners’ perception of tones is quasi-categorical whereas French listeners’ is psychophysically based. French listeners nevertheless show substantial sensitivity to tone contour differences, though to a lesser extent than Taiwanese listeners. Thus, the findings suggest that despite the lack of lexical tone contrasts in the French language, French listeners are not absolutely “deaf” to tonal variations. They simply fail to perceive tones along the lines of a well-defined and finite set of linguistic categories.

Processing of illegal consonant clusters: a case of perceptual assimilation?

Evidence is presented for a perceptual shift affecting consonant clusters that are phonotactically illegal, albeit pronounceable, in French. They are perceived as phonetically close legal clusters. Specifically, word-initial /dl/ and /tl/ are heard as /gl/ and /kl/, respectively. In 2 phonemic gating experiments, participants generally judged short gates--which did not yet contain information about the 2nd consonant /l/--as being dental stops. However, as information for the /l/ became available in larger gates, a perceptual shift developed in which the initial stops were increasingly judged to be velars. A final phoneme monitoring test suggested that this kind of shift took place on-line during speech processing and with some extratemporal processing cost. These results provide evidence for the automatic integration of low-level phonetic information into a more abstract code determined by the native phonological system.

Cross language phonetic influences on the speech of French-English bilinguals.

We examined the voice onset times (VOTs) of monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and French to address the question whether cross language phonetic influences occur particularly in simultaneous bilinguals (that is, speakers who learned both languages from birth). Speakers produced sentences in which there were target words with initial /p/, /t/ or /k/. In French, natively bilingual speakers produced VOTs that were significantly longer than those of monolingual French speakers. French VOTs were even longer in bilingual speakers who learned English before learning French. The outcome was analogous in English speech. Natively bilingual speakers produced shorter English VOTs than monolingual speakers. English VOTs were even shorter in the speech of bilinguals who learned French before English. Bilingual speakers had significantly longer VOTs in their English speech than in their French. Accordingly, the cross language effects do not occur because natively bilingual speakers adopt voiceless stop categories intermediate between those of native English and French speakers that serve both languages. Monolingual speakers of French or English in Montreal had VOTs nearly identical respectively to those of monolingual Parisian French speakers and those of monolingual Connecticut English speakers. These results suggest that mere exposure to a second language does not underlie the cross language phonetic effect; however, these findings must be resolved with others that appear to show an effect of overhearing.

Beginnings of Prosodic Organization: Intonation and Duration Patterns of Disyllables Produced by Japanese and French Infants:

In this study, some prosodic aspects of the disyllabic vocalizations (both babbling and words) produced by four French and four Japanese children of about 18 months of age, are examined. F0 contour and vowel durations in disyllables are found to be clearly language-specific. For French infants, rising F0 contours and final syllable lengthening are the rule, whereas falling F0 contours and absence of final lengthening are the rule for Japanese children. These results are congruent with adult prosody in the two languages. They hold for both babbling and utterances identified as words. The disyllables produced by the Japanese infants reflect adult forms not only in terms of global intonation patterns, but also in terms of tone and duration characteristics at the lexical level.

A voice for the voiceless: Production and perception of assimilated stops in French

Abstract Previous studies, mainly conducted on English running speech, have reported that (place) assimilation between words is usually incomplete, and have suggested that the perceptual processing of word forms altered by that assimilation depends on the extent to which phonemes at word boundary have undergone assimilation. The present research provides an acoustic–phonetic description of regressive voice assimilation in French and proposes an objective measure of “voicing degree” for stops in word-final position. This measure is the relative duration of voicing within the stop closure. It is shown to closely correlate with perceptual judgments of voicedness. Across two experiments, we show that voice assimilation in French is graded and asymmetrical in that voiceless stops assimilate to a larger extent than voiced stops do. It also appears that assimilation is slightly modulated by lexical factors such as potential ambiguity and phonological neighborhood. If a word belongs to a minimal pair for final stop voicing (e.g., rate /rat/ ‘spleen’ minimally contrasts with rade /rad/ ‘harbor’), assimilation strength tends to be weaker. The same trend applies to a word challenged by ‘dangerous’ phonological neighbors that only differ from it by their word-final consonant.

Evidence for tone-specific activity of the sternohyoid muscle in Modern Standard Chinese

The role of the cricothyroid muscle (CT) in raising F0 is well understood, but the activity of F0-lowering strap muscles such as the sternohyoid (SH) has been less thoroughly investigated, especially in speech. This study focused on the activve participation of the SH in the production of tones 2 (mid-rising) and 4 (high-falling) in Modern Standard Chinese. The other tones, however, together with the role of the CT and vocalis muscles, were also investigated in order to replicate earlier findings and to provide a more comprehensive picture of the production of Chinese tones. EMG data recorded from two male speakers show that the SH is consistently utilized to reset F0 to a mid-low value at the onset of tone 2. Based on a comparison with earlier results for Thai speakers, we argue that this is a mandatory manoeuvre for producing rising F0 contours in most contexts. The SH muscle also participates in the F0 fall of tone 4, but less consistently. We argue that the latter manoeuvre may not be obligatory, especially in the case of speakers with a high-pitched voice.

Perceptual processing of partially and fully assimilated words in French

Models of speech perception attribute a different role to contextual information in the processing of assimilated speech. This study concerned perceptual processing of regressive voice assimilation in French. This phonological variation is asymmetric in that assimilation is partial for voiced stops and nearly complete for voiceless stops. Two auditory-visual cross-modal form priming experiments were used to examine perceptual compensation for assimilation in French words with voiceless versus voiced stop offsets. The results show that, for the former segments, assimilating context enhances underlying form recovery, whereas it does not for the latter. These results suggest that two sources of information -- contextual information and bottom-up information from the assimilated forms themselves -- are complementary and both come into play during the processing of fully or partially assimilated word forms.

Biomechanically Preferred Consonant-Vowel Combinations Fail to Appear in Adult Spoken Corpora.

Certain consonant/vowel (CV) combinations are more frequent than would be expected from the individual C and V frequencies alone, both in babbling and, to a lesser extent, in adult language, based on dictionary counts: Labial consonants co-occur with central vowels more often than chance would dictate; coronals co-occur with front vowels, and velars with back vowels (Davis & MacNeilage, 1994). Plausible biomechanical explanations have been proposed, but it is also possible that infants are mirroring the frequency of the CVs that they hear. As noted, previous assessments of adult language were based on dictionaries; these “type” counts are incommensurate with the babbling measures, which are necessarily “token” counts. We analyzed the tokens in two spoken corpora for English, two for French and one for Mandarin. We found that the adult spoken CV preferences correlated with the type counts for Mandarin and French, not for English. Correlations between the adult spoken corpora and the babbling results had all three possible outcomes: significantly positive (French), uncorrelated (Mandarin), and significantly negative (English). There were no correlations of the dictionary data with the babbling results when we consider all nine combinations of consonants and vowels. The results indicate that spoken frequencies of CV combinations can differ from dictionary (type) counts and that the CV preferences apparent in babbling are biomechanically driven and can ignore the frequencies of CVs in the ambient spoken language.

Voice assimilation in French obstruents: Categorical or gradient?

This work contributes to the issue of categoricity versus gradiency in natural assimilations. We focused on voice-assimilation in French and started from the assumption that the main cue to obstruent voicing is glottal pulsing. We quantified glottal pulsing continuously with a single acoustic measure — the proportion in duration of voiced portion(s) within a consonant — which we call v-ratio. We used a large corpus of French radio and television speech to compute v-ratios for all the obstruents appearing in word-final to word-initial obstruent contacts. The results were analyzed in terms of v-ratio distributions, which were compared with theoretical distributions predicted by two contrasted hypotheses on the mechanisms of assimilation: categorical switch versus v-ratio shift. The comparisons strongly suggested that, although voicing itself can be incomplete, voice assimilation is essentially categorical in terms of v-ratio. We discuss this result in the light of recent perceptual data showing sensitivity to extremely subtle acoustic differences: secondary cues to voicing do not seem to follow the same pattern of categoricity as glottal pulsing.