In spoken French, the phonological processes of liaison and resyllabification can
render word and syllable boundaries ambiguous. In the case of liaison, for example, the
/n/ in the masculine indefinite article un [oẽ] is normally latent, but when followed by a
vowel-initial word the /n/ surfaces and is resyllabified as the onset of that word. Thus, the
phrases un air ‘a melody’ and un nerf ‘a nerve’ are produced with identical phonemic
content and syllable boundaries [oẽ.nɛʁ]). Some research has suggested that speakers of
French give listeners cues to word boundaries by varying the duration of consonants that
surface in liaison environments relative to consonants produced word-initially.
Production studies (e.g. Wauquier-Gravelines 1996; Spinelli et al. 2003) have
demonstrated that liaison consonants (e.g. /n/ in un air) are significantly shorter than the
same consonant in initial position (e.g. /n/ in un nerf). Studies on the perception of
spoken French have suggested that listeners exploit these durational differences in the
segmentation of running speech (e.g. Gaskell et al. 2002; Spinelli et al. 2003), though no
study to date has tested this hypothesis directly.
The current study employs a direct test of the exploitation of duration as a
segmentation cue by manipulating this single acoustic factor while holding all other
factors constant. Thirty-six native speakers of French and 54 adult learners of French as a second language (L2) were tested on both an AX discrimination task and a forced-choice
identification task which employed stimuli in which the durations of pivotal consonants
(e.g. /n/ in [oẽ.nɛʁ]) were instrumentally shortened and lengthened. The results suggest
that duration alone can indeed modulate the lexical interpretation of sequences rendered
sequences in spoken French. Shortened stimuli elicited a significantly larger proportion
of vowel-initial (liaison) responses, while lengthened stimuli elicited a significantly
larger proportion of consonant-initial responses, indicating that both native and
(advanced) non-native speakers are indeed sensitive to this acoustic cue.
These results add to a growing body of work demonstrating that listeners use
extremely fined-grained acoustic detail to modulate lexical access (e.g. Salverda et al.
2003; Shatzman & McQueen 2006). In addition, the current results have manifest
ramifications for study of the upper limits of L2 acquisition and the plasticity of the adult
perceptual system in that they show evidence nativelike sensitivity to non-contrastive
phonological variation. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6643 |
| Date | 23 October 2009 |
| Creators | Shoemaker, Ellenor Marguerite |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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