Sequence detection in pseudowords in French: Where is the syllable effect?

Abstract

In two experiments, French speakers detected cv or cvc sequences at the beginning of disyllabic pseudowords varying in syllable structure and pivotal consonant. Overall, both studies failed to replicate the crossover interaction that has been previously observed in French by Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder and Seguṍ (1981). In both experiments, latencies were shorter to cv than to cvc targets and this effect of target length was generally smaller for cvc . cv than for cv . cv carriers. However, a clear crossover interaction was observed for liquid pivotal consonants under target-blocking conditions, Alain Content, Laboratoire de Psychologie Expé rimentale, ULB-LAPSE CP191, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 50, B-1050 Bruxelles Belgium. E-mail: acontent@ulb.ac.beThe present research was supported by grants from the FNRS, Switzerland (1114Switzerland ( -039553.93 , 1113Switzerland ( -049698.9 6 and 1114 ) and from the Direction gé né rale de la Recherche scienti que -Communauté française de . Preliminary reports were presented at the second AMLAP Meeting (Torino, 1996), and at the 1997 Eurospeech Conference. Ruth Kearns is now with Procter and Gamble Technical Centres Ltd. Thanks go to Christophe Pallier for comments on a previous version and to Nicolas Dumay for his help in the nal stages of manuscript preparation. and especially for slow participants. A third experiment collected phonemegating data on the same pseudowords to obtain estimates of the duration of the initial phonemes. Regression analyses showed that phoneme duration accounted for a large proportion of the variance for cvc target detection, suggesting that participants were reacting rather directly to phonemic throughput. These ndings argue against the hypothesis of an early syllabic classi cation mechanism in the perception of speech.How acoustic-phonetic information is mapped onto lexical representations constitutes a central issue in the study of speech perception and spoken word recognition. Various kinds of linguistic units, ranging from phonetic features to syllables, have been proposed to mediate the mapping process. Among these units, researchers have long considered the syllable as an obvious choice. Indeed, since the syllable constitutes the domain of most coarticulation phenomena, it appears to provide a natural way of dealing with the problem of variability in the signal. One in uential source of evidence favouring the hypothesis that syllable units are instrumental in speech processing comes from studies using the sequence detection task (see Frauenfelder & Kearns, 1996). In the original study (Mehler, Dommergues, Frauenfelder, & Seguṍ, 1981), French subjects detected Consonant-Vowel (cv) or Consonant-Vowel-Consonan t (cvc) targets in spoken target-bearing carrier words whose initial syllable was either cv or cvc. For instance, pa and pal were detected in words like pa . lace and pal . mier.1 Detection latencies were shorter when the target exactly matched the rst syllable of the carrier word, with responses to pa faster in pa . lace than pal . m...

Rhythmic Categories in Spoken-Word Recognition

“…Indeed, Dupoux et al (1999) and Dehaene-Lambertz et al (2000), while reporting data on the mora, couch their explanation in terms of a proposal originally formulated for the syllable (Mehler, Dupoux & Segui, 1990). However, note that recent evidence on the role of the syllable in processing spoken French Content, Meunier et al, 2001) is also entirely consistent with our present universalist perspective: rhythmic boundaries are relevant for segmentation, but rhythmic units do not intervene as independent structural units. Content and colleagues report several converging lines of experimental evidence from French, from phoneme monitoring, fragment monitoring, word spotting, and explicit segmentation judgements and conclude that syllables do not constitute indivisible units which participate in the perceptual processing of spoken French.…”

“…Specifically, a single-phoneme context which was in its own right a mora did not reduce activation of an adjacent word as drastically as did a single-phoneme context which was nonmoraic. It has also recently been claimed by see also Content, Meunier, Kearns, & Frauenfelder, 2001) that the role of the syllable in the recognition of spoken French accords with Norris et al's proposal; the syllable does not constitute an intermediate level of representation on which lexical access is based, but syllable boundaries are nevertheless relevant to lexical activation in that they constitute likely word boundaries.…”

Effect of Syllable Congruency in Sixth Graders in the Lexical Decision Task With Masked Priming

“…However, the effect was not fully replicated in follow-up studies (e.g., Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui, 1986;Tabossi, Collina, Mazzetti, & Zoppello, 2000). In particular, Content, Meunier, Kearns, and Frauenfelder (2001) showed that syllable congruency effects in French emerged only under restrictive conditions, namely, for target words including a liquid pivotal consonant (e.g., bal.con).…”

Processing resyllabified words in French

“…That is, listeners were faster to detect target sequences when they matched the syllabification of the target-bearing words. Although the generalizability of this original finding has recently been called into question (Content et al, 2001b), it remains clear that French listeners use syllabic structure in speech segmentation (Content et al, 2001a, b;Dumay et al, 2002).One might therefore predict that French listeners will have difficulty recognizing words which are misaligned with syllable boundaries, like oignon in dernier oignon. But French listeners generally do not appear to have problems with word recognition in liaison environments.…”