Émergence d'une unité sublexicale au cours d'une tâche d'abréviation

Abstract

Summary: Emergence of sublexical unit during an abbreviation task. Are there one or more linguistic units which play a basic role in accessing the mental lexicon? To answer this question we have studied a common process: the abbreviation process, which is composed of two stages: 1) abbreviation production (time and space gains) and 2) reconstruction of the source word from the abbreviation. The existence of this second stage, which requires access to the mental lexicon, has led us to think that abbreviations might update the unit, or units, allowing lexical access. In the present experiment, subjects abbreviated frequent french substantives which were presented to them auditorily, either in isolation or in a phrasal context. It appears that, whatever the context, one abbreviation dominates all others. We have defined this abbreviation as: (n - x) + attack (n = number of syllables in the word; x = number of syllables removed, starting from the end of the word, x < n; attack = attack of the syllable which follows the one or more remaining syllables). Key words: lexical access, abbreviation, syllabic structure, BOSS, visually presented word recognition.

The role of syllabic structure in French visual word recognition

“…Establishing the optimal sublexical fragment for such activation would provide information about the structure of the lexical representation of polysyllabic words. Because Rouibah and Tiberghien (1994) observed that participants preferentially abbreviated French words by their BOSS and because an abbreviation is a word fragment from which the whole word is supposed to be retrieved, one can make the prediction that the BOSS will be preferred over the syllable as the activation unit. If this is the case, it means that the sublexical unit implicated in French visual word recognition is different from the one implicated in French spoken word recognition.…”

“…In fact, a study carried out by Rouibah and Tiberghien (1994) gave some indication that the BOSS plays a role in the processing of written French. Rouibah and Tiberghien observed that when participants had to freely abbreviate spoken French disyllabic words, they preferentially produced abbreviations of the BOSS type (70% of the total production), whatever the structure of the syllable boundary was (e.g., one consonant at the syllable boundary, as in SOLEIL; two consonants at the syllable boundary, with one being the first syllable coda and one being the second syllable onset, as in COMBAT; or two consonants at the syllable boundary, forming the second syllable onset, as in LIVRET).…”