Durational Cues to Word Recognition in Spoken French

Ellenor Shoemaker (1)

1 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

In spoken French, the phonological processes of liaison and resyllabification can render word and syllable boundaries ambiguous (e.g. un air 'an air' / un nerf 'a nerve', both [ɛ̃.nɛʁ]). Production data have demonstrated that speakers of French vary the duration of consonants that surface in liaison environments relative to consonants produced word-initially (Wauquier- Gravelines 1996; Spinelli et al. 2003). Further research has suggested that listeners exploit these durational differences in the processing of running speech (Gaskell et al., 2001; Spinelli et al., 2003), though no study to date has directly tested this hypothesis. The current study examines the exploitation of duration in word recognition processes by manipulating this single acoustic factor while holding all other factors in the signal constant. The pivotal consonants in potentially ambiguous French sequences (e.g. /n/ in un nerf) were instrumentally shortened and lengthened and presented to listeners in two behavioral tasks. Results suggest that listeners are sensitive to segmental duration and use this information to modulate the lexical interpretation of spoken French.

Mots clés: liaison; speech segmentation; spoken word recognition; phonology; psycholinguistics

Domaines: Linguistique

Ellenor Shoemaker. Durational Cues to Word Recognition in Spoken French. 2011. ⟨halshs-00683607⟩