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Listeners generally detect syllables faster than phonemes in overt speech. This ���syllable advantage��� holds robustly for utterance-initial CV vs. C targets [Segui et al., 1981. Phoneme monitoring, syllable monitoring and lexical access. British Journal of Psychology, 72(4), 471���477]. We report a syllable advantage when monitoring inner speech. Spanish-speaking Argentinian participants presented with pictures were faster and more accurate at detecting CV than C targets at the beginning of the pictures��� names. This CV over C advantage maintained, although substantially weakened, after adding CV��� foils in CV-target trials, a manipulation logically more detrimental to CV- than C-detection. Our results converge with previous studies showing intriguing parallelisms between overt and inner speech perception and processing, supporting a restricted version of Levelt���s perceptual-loop hypothesis. We discuss what common basic units of processing could be, borrowing from the articulatory phonology framework and its proposal of a ���common currency��� between speakers and listeners.

In Shanghai Chinese as well as many other Wu dialects, breathy voice is a well-documented accompaniment of the low-register tone syllables with obstruent as well as sonorant onsets. But Shanghai Chinese is rapidly changing and the breathy voice associated with low-register tones tends to disappear in young speakers’ productions. In this study, we asked whether breathy voice is nevertheless still perceived and whether it pushes tone identification toward low-register tones. We conducted forced-choice tone identification tests on young native listeners of Shanghai Chinese, using low–high register tone continua—from tone T3 (23) to tone T2 (34)—imposed on base syllables with either modal or breathy voice quality, and beginning with various onset consonants. We used continua constructed from either naturally produced or synthesized syllables. Our results show that breathy voice does bias tone identification responses toward the low-register tone T3. This result held for both synthesized and natural stimuli, except for the /m/-onset stimuli derived from naturally produced syllables. We propose that the phonetic change at issue—loss of breathiness in production—is not due to misperception but reflects the ever-stronger influence of Standard Mandarin Chinese. In other words, this particular case of sound change seems to be led by production rather than perception. It remains an open question whether this kind of sound change is only determined by sociolinguistic factors (here, the dominance of Mandarin Chinese) or is independently motivated by phonetic and/or phonological factors.

This study investigates the relations between tone, voicing, and voice quality in modern Shanghai Chinese. In low tone syllables, word-initial obstruent onsets are traditionally described as voiceless and breathy, and sonorant onsets as voiced and breathy.Our study is based on acoustic and electroglottographic (EGG) data from speakers of two age groups (20–30 vs. 60–80 years). Our results are globally in line with previous studies, but with notable differences. In low tone syllables, while word-initial stops are phonetically voiceless most of the time, fricatives are quite often phonetically voiced. While low tone obstruent onsets are followed by breathier vowels than high tone onsets, this pattern is not clear-cut for nasal onsets. Furthermore, our transversal data show that low tone breathiness is more systematically produced by elderly – especially male – speakers, rather than young speakers, suggesting an on-going change towards the loss of breathiness.

This study investigates the relationship between the production and perception of word-initial gemination in stops and fricatives in Tashlhiyt Berber. Gemination in this language is primarily implemented through longer duration, even for utterance-initial voiceless stops. This timing information is sufficient for native listeners to identify geminate fricatives and voiced stops and distinguish them from their singleton counterparts. For voiceless stops, however, native listeners’ discrimination performance is only slightly above chance level. Native speakers can thus encode a phonemic contrast at the articulatory level and yet be unable to fully decode it at the perceptual level. Implications of these results for the general issue of phonological representation of gemination are briefly discussed.

Tashlhiyt is famous for its particularly marked syllable structure. Unlike the majority of world languages, including some related Berber varieties, Tashlhiyt allows not only vowels but all consonants – including voiceless stops /t/, /k/ or /q/ – to be nuclei of a syllable (e.g., [tkmi] `she smoked' is analyzed as bisyllabic where the sequence [tk] stands for a syllable of its own with /k/ as the nucleus). A fundamental aspect of this analysis concerns constraints on the syllable onset constituent: complex onsets are prohibited. A consequence of this is that prevocalic consonant clusters are systematically parsed as heterosyllabic, regardless of the sonority profile of the consonants and the position of the cluster within a word or a phrase. This study provides phonetic and metalinguistic data to test this phonological account on experimental grounds. The analysis of these data provides clear evidence that Tashlhiyt disallows complex syllable onsets.

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.

pre-print: à paraître dansLanguage and Speech; The first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: le, la, les, un, une, des. The six articles were compared with pseudo articles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic nouns, using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. The pseudo articles were similar to real articles in terms of phonetic composition and phonotactic probability, and real and pseudo noun phrases were alike in terms of overall prosodic contour. In three experiments, 11-month-old infants showed preference for real over pseudo articles, suggesting they have the articles' word-forms stored in long-term memory. The second part of the study evaluates several hypotheses about the role of articles in 11-month-olds infants' word recognition. Evidence from three experiments support the view that articles help infants to recognize the following words. We propose that 11-month-olds have the capacity to parse noun phrases into their constituents, which is consistent with the more general view that function words define a syntactic skeleton that serves as a basis for parsing spoken utterances. This proposition is compared to a competing account, which argues that 11-month-olds recognize noun-phrases as whole-words.

French listeners perceive illegal /tl/ and /dl/ clusters as legal /kl/ and /gl/, suggesting that /dl, tl/ undergo "phonotactic perceptual assimilation" to the phonetically most similar permissible clusters [Hallé et al., J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. (1998)]. However, without a comparison to native speakers of a language allowing initial /tl, dl/, other explanations remain open (e.g., universal phonetic biases). Experiment 1 compared native French and Hebrew listeners on perception of Hebrew /tl/-/kl/ and /dl/-/gl/. On a language-specific phonotactics account, these contrasts should be difficult for listeners whose language disallows initial /tl, dl/ while allowing /kl, gl/ (French), but not for listeners whose language permits all four clusters (Hebrew). Indeed, French but not Hebrew listeners showed difficulty discriminating /tl/-/kl/, and tended to categorize the initial consonant of /tl/ as /k/; analogous effects for /dl/-/gl/ were weaker. Experiment 2 tested speakers of American English, which also disallows initial /tl, dl/ but realizes stop-voicing differently than French or Hebrew, to examine possible contributions of language-specific phonetic settings. Their performance was similar to that of French listeners, though they had significantly greater difficulty with /dl-/gl/. The results support the proposal of language-specific phonotactic perceptual assimilation, with modest contributions from language-specific phonetic settings.

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical items than to a phonetically comparable rare list, but 9-month-olds did not. Reversing the stress pattern of the familiar items failed to block word-form recognition in 11-month-olds, although a time-course analysis showed that it delayed the infant response. Changing the initial consonant of English words did block word recognition while change to the second consonant did not. Time-course analyses of both the English and the original French data showed that altering the consonant of the unaccented syllable delays word-form recognition in both languages while change to the accented syllable has a stronger effect in English than in French.

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.

In this research, we combine a cross-form word–picture visual masked priming procedure with an internal phoneme monitoring task to examine repetition priming effects. In this paradigm, participants have to respond to pictures whose names begin with a prespecified target phoneme. This task unambiguously requires retrieving the word-form of the target picture's name and implicitly orients participants' attention towards a phonological level of representation. The experiments were conducted within Spanish, whose highly transparent orthography presumably promotes fast and automatic phonological recoding of subliminal, masked visual word primes. Experiments 1 and 2 show that repetition primes speed up internal phoneme monitoring in the target, compared to primes beginning with a different phoneme from the target, or sharing only their first phoneme with the target. This suggests that repetition primes preactivate the phonological code of the entire target picture's name, hereby speeding up internal monitoring, which is necessarily based on such a code. To further qualify the nature of the phonological code underlying internal phoneme monitoring, a concurrent articulation task was used in Experiment 3. This task did not affect the repetition priming effect. We propose that internal phoneme monitoring is based on an abstract phonological code, prior to its translation into articulation.

In French words such as “absurde” (“bs/bt” words), the underlying linguistic code /b/ corresponds both to the spelling “b” and to the morphophonemic code {ab-} + {surd}. Yet, because of voice assimilation, the phonetic-acoustic and perceptual realization of the labial stop is [p] not [b]. In a phoneme monitoring task, listeners detected /b/ more often but more slowly than /p/ in “bs/bt” words. A phonemic gating task revealed the time course of phonetic judgments. The /b/ responses gradually increased and eventually overcame the initially dominant /p/ responses before words were identified, as a classic word-guessing gating task showed. A further phoneme monitoring task with nonwords that mimicked the “bs/bt” words confirmed that the linguistic code inducing /b/ responses built up prelexically. We propose that this code is lexically mediated by a cohort of words sharing the graphic code “b.” Alternatively, it could be conveyed by prefixes identified on-line, such as {ab-} in “absurde.”

The perception of American English (AE) approximant contrasts, /r/-/l/ in particular but also /w/-/r/ and /w/-/j/, has been extensively compared between AE speakers and speakers of Japanese or other languages lacking an /r/-/l/ contrast. The difficulty such listeners encounter with the AE /r/-/l/ contrast, especially those who have had little exposure to spoken English, has most often been explained by reference to the abstract functional contrasts of their native phonological systems, which lack distinctions between rhotic (/r/) and lateral (/l/) consonants. According to that reasoning, speakers of languages who do possess an /r/-/l/ distinction, such as French, should encounter little or no perceptual difficulty with AE /r/-/l/. However, French and AE /r/s differ markedly in their articulatory-phonetic characteristics, which suggests the possibility that French listeners might have some difficulty categorizing AE /r/. The present study therefore examined identification and discrimination of the AE continua /r/-/l/, /w/-/r/, and /w/-/j/ by French participants. As anticipated on the basis of the phonetic differences between the /r/s of the two languages, the French listeners had some perceptual difficulties with AE /r/, which they tended to assimilate as /w/-like. We conclude that the detailed articulatory-phonetic properties of the native versus non-native consonant categories, rather than solely the abstract phonological contrasts of the two languages, account for this perceptual pattern.

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.

French (or English) native listeners hear /kl/ when presented with the illegal consonant sequence */tl/. This robust case of perceptual repair is usually viewed as operating at a prelexical level of speech processing but the evidence against lexical feedback is somewhat weak. In this study, we report new data supporting the prelexical hypothesis, obtained with a paradigm that avoids most of the possible confounds in previous studies. In a cross-modal auditory–visual priming paradigm, lexical decisions to the same visual target “clavier” are facilitated by the auditory prime *tlavier, not by *dlavier. Likewise, the recognition of “glacier” is facilitated by *dlacier, not by *tlacier. To summarize, velar stop + /l/ words are exclusively facilitated by the dental-initial derived forms with the same voicing. Derived forms with the opposite voicing tend to induce inhibition rather than facilitation. Hence, the observed facilitation effects are not graded from */tl/ to */dl/ or vice versa. We argue that these rather surprising all-or-none priming effects exclude the possibility that the */tl/→/kl/ and */dl/→/gl/ repairs are due, even partly, to lexical feedback. Index Terms: phonotactic, perceptual repair, lexical feedback

Eleven-month-olds can recognize a few auditorily presented familiar words in experimental situations where no hints are given by the intonation, the situation, or the presence of possible visual referents. That is, infants of this age (and possibly somewhat younger) can recognize words based on sound patterns alone. The issue addressed in this article is what is the type of mental representations infants use to code words they recognize. The results of a series of experiments with French-learning infants indicate that word representations in 11-month-olds are segmentally underspecified and suggest that they are all the more underspecified when infants engage in recognizing words rather than merely attending to meaningless speech sounds. But underspecification has limits, which were explored here with respect to word-initial consonants. The last two experiments show the way to investigating further these limits for word-initial consonants as well as for segments in other word positions. In French, infants' word representations are flexible enough to allow for structural changes in the voicing or even in the manner of articulation of word-initial consonants. Word-initial consonants must be present, however, for words to be recognized. In conclusion, a parallel is proposed between the emerging capacities to ignore variations that are irrelevant for word recognition in a “lexical mode” and to ignore variations that are phonemically irrelevant in a “neutral mode” of listening to native speech.

EnglishPicture naming is a highly popular task in language production research. In particular, the frequency effect obtained in picture naming is generally considered as the signature of lexical access in speech production. However, it is quite well established that picture naming is very sensitive to the phonetic properties of the word to be produced, imposing some limitations in using this task. In this paper, we look for a frequency effect in the lexical access to picture names, by means of a phoneme-monitoring task. This task requires access to the object name’s phonological representation but not its actual articulation. We found a robust frequency effect. Two additional experiments—visual object identification and semantic categorization—allow us to assume that the locus for the frequency effect is lexical. francaisLa denomination d’images est une procedure privilegiee pour l’etude de la production du langage. En particulier, l’effet de frequence en denomination a ete considere comme la signature de l’acces au lexique mental. Toutefois, en raison de sa nature articulatoire, la reponse de denomination est tres sensible aux proprietes phonetiques du mot a produire, ce qui contraint son utilisation. Dans cet article, nous examinons l’effet de frequence dans l’acces lexical aux noms d’image en utilisant une tâche de detection de phoneme. Cette tâche necessite l’acces a la representation phonologique du nom de l’objet, mais pas son articulation. Nous trouvons un effet robuste de frequence. Deux experiences complementaires –identification d’objet visuel et categorisation semantique – nous permettent de supposer que le locus de l’effet de frequence est lexical.