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The goal of this study was to explore whether viewing the speaker's articulatory gestures contributes to lexical access in children (ages 5-10) and in adults. We conducted a vowel monitoring task with words and pseudo-words in audio-only (AO) and audiovisual (AV) contexts with white noise masking the acoustic signal. The results indicated that children clearly benefited from visual speech from age 6-7 onwards. However, unlike adults, the word superiority effect was not greater in the AV than the AO condition in children, suggesting that visual speech mostly contributes to phonemic--rather than lexical--processing during childhood, at least until the age of 10. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)

The present study investigated the role of spelling in phonological variant processing. Participants learned the auditory forms of potential reduced variants of novel French words (e.g., /plur/) and their associations with pictures of novel objects over 4 days. After the fourth day of training, the spelling of each novel word was presented once. Half the words were spelled with an orthographic representation of the schwa (i.e., "e"), half were not. In the subsequent naming tasks, participants produced more schwa variants for novel words whose spelling contained an "e". In addition, reduced variants with an "e" in spelling and an onset cluster attested word-internally in non-schwa words were produced with longer latencies than the same items whose spelling did not contain an "e". Finally, in a recognition task where participants had to decide whether a given spoken item was part of the experimental stimuli trained the previous days, participants were more likely to say yes to a schwa variant when the spelling for the given word corresponded to this variant. These results show that a single exposure to spelling following extensive phonological learning can change the way speakers and listeners store and process words with phonological variants both in production and recognition tasks. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

"AU" /o/ and "AN" /a/ in French are both complex graphemes, but they vary in their strength of association to their respective sounds. The letter sequence "AU" is systematically associated to the phoneme /o/, and as such is always parsed as a complex grapheme. However, "AN" can be associated with either one phoneme (/a/ in e.g., "CRAN" /kRa/ "notch") and be parsed as a complex grapheme; or with two phonemes (/an/ in e.g., "CANE" /kan/ "duck"), thus being parsed as two simple graphemes. As a consequence, "AU" would be a more cohesive grapheme than "AN", for which there is a parsing ambiguity. We examined whether the reading and writing systems take into account this potential parsing ambiguity due to the graphemes' degree of cohesion when processing complex graphemes. Experiment 1 consisted of a letter detection task. The participants had to detect, for example A in strongly cohesive complex graphemes (e.g., "AU" /o/) or weakly cohesive complex graphemes (e.g., "AN" /a/). A was detected faster in weakly cohesive complex graphemes than in strongly cohesive ones. In a handwriting task (Experiment 2) we found that weakly cohesive complex graphemes (e.g., "ON") yielded longer programming times than strongly cohesive ones (e.g., "OU"), suggesting that the handwriting system also takes into account the potential decomposability of the complex graphemes into either one (ON /[yogh]/) or two (O+N /on/) units. Overall, our results show an effect of parsing ambiguity due to graphemic cohesion of complex graphemes; these results should be accounted for by current models of written word processing and spelling. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

This study investigates whether children's production and recognition of obligatory liaison sequences in French depend on the singular/plural orientation of nouns. Certain nouns occur more frequently in the plural (e.g., "arbre" "tree"), whereas others are found more often in the singular (e.g., "arc-en-ciel" "rainbow"). In the input, children more frequently encounter these plural-oriented nouns after determiners that indicate plurality (e.g., "les", "des" "the", "deux" "two") and that are often associated with a /"z"/ liaison (e.g., "deux arbres" [dozarbr] "two trees"). In Experiment 1, 122 children (3 years 2 months to 6 years 3 months of age) were asked to produce nominal phrases with either /"z"/ liaisons (i.e., in plural contexts such as "deux ours" [dozurs] "two bears") or /n/ liaisons (i.e., in singular contexts such as "un ours" [oenurs] "one bear"). We found correlations between the plural orientation of the nouns and (a) the probability that they will be preceded by an incorrect /"z"/ liaison in the singular context and (b) the probability that they will be preceded by a correct /"z"/ liaison in the plural context. This result was, however, restricted to the younger children. In Experiment 2, 20 children (5 years 5 months to 6 years 3 months of age) were asked to monitor target words in auditorily presented sentences. The results showed shorter reaction times for singular-oriented nouns when preceded by a singular determiner than when preceded by a plural determiner. Conversely, plural-oriented nouns were responded to faster when preceded by a plural determiner than when preceded by a singular determiner. Results are discussed within the framework of a two-stage model of liaison acquisition recently proposed by Chevrot, Chabanal, and Dugua ("Journal of French Language Studies", 17 [2007] 103-128) as well as by Chevrot, Dugua, and Fayol ("Journal of Child Language" [in press]). (Contains 3 tables.)

In three experiments we explored the mental representation of morphologically complex words in French. Subjects were asked to perform a gender decision task on morphologically complex words that were of the same gender as their base or not. We found that gender decisions were made more slowly for morphologically complex words made from a base with an opposite gender compared to words for which the gender of the base matches that of the derived noun. Similar results were obtained for words that are pseudo-morphologically complex while no effect was observed for non-morphological embedded words. Our results suggest that during gender identification of derived and pseudo-derived words, morpheme and pseudo-morpheme lexical representations are activated, as well as their gender information. Also our results suggest that the noun ending predictability effect observed in previous experiments could in fact reflect decomposition into morphemes.

In a crossmodal priming experiment, visual targets (e.g. "RENARD," "fox") were auditorily primed by either an intact [l[schwa][R][schwa]na[R]] "the fox" or reduced form [l[schwa][R]na[R]] "the fox" of the word. When schwa deletion gave rise to an initial cluster that respected the phonotactic constraints of French (e.g. [lapluz] "the lawn" in which /pl/ is a legal word beginning in French), there was a processing cost for the targets primed by the reduced form of the word compared to intact primes (e.g. [lap[schwa]luz] "the lawn"). However, when schwa deletion produced an initial cluster that violated the phonotactic constraints of French (e.g. [l[schwa][R]na[R]], where /Rn/ is not allowed as a word beginning), there was no penalty for targets primed by reduced compared to intact forms of the word. Assuming that listeners change their phonemic percept when confronted with phonotactically illegal sequences (Segui, Frauenfelder, & Halle, 2001), phonotactic constraints may help to restore the deleted schwa in sequences like "le renard" [l[schwa][R]na[R]] in French.

Examined whether context marked for grammatical gender can constrain the processing of homphone words in French. Homophones whose different meaning are associated with words of different genders were used in two cross-modal semantic priming experiments. (Author/VWL)

Four experiments were carried out to examine phonological priming effects on bisyllabic target words. In the first two, monosyllabic word and pseudoword primes facilitated lexical decisions to auditorily presented bisyllabic words. The second replicated the initial-overlap effect for monosyllabic word primes using a crossmodal method. In the third, the initial overlap facilitation effect was replicated in a naming task. (Author/VWL)

Byline: Alix Seigneuric (a), Daniel Zagar (b), Fanny Meunier (c), Elsa Spinelli (d) Keywords: Language acquisition; Grammatical gender; French gender; Gender-ending regularities; Gender cues Abstract: The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically feminine, or neutral. Two response conditions were used. In the determiner condition, children indicated the gender class by orally providing the determiner un or une marked for gender. In the picture condition, responses were given by pointing to the picture of a Martian-like female or male person that would be best called by each spoken pseudoword. Results indicated that as young as 3years, children associated the determiner corresponding to the ending bias at greater than chance levels. Ending-consistent performance increased from 3 to 9years of age. Moreover, from 4years of age onward, sensitivity to endings affected categorization. Starting at that age, pictures were selected according to endings at greater than chance levels. This effect also increased with age. The discussion deals with the mechanisms of language acquisition and the relation between language and cognition. Author Affiliation: (a) CESG, UMR CNRS 5170, Universite de Bourgogne, Dijon, France (b) SocioPsychologie et Management du Sport (SPMS), Universite de Bourgogne, Dijon, France (c) Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, UMR CNRS 5596, Lyon, France (d) Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, UMR CNRS 5105, Universite Pierre Mendes France, Grenoble, France Article History: Received 5 October 2005; Revised 15 December 2006

Lexical decision latencies to word targets presented either visually or auditorily were faster when directly preceded by a briefly presented (53-ms) pattern-masked visual prime that was the same word as the target (repetition primes), compared with different word primes. Primes that were pseudohomophones of target words did not significantly influence target processing compared with unrelated primes (Experiments 1-2) but did produce robust priming effects with slightly longer prime exposures (67 ms) in Experiment 3. Like repetition priming, these pseudohomophone priming effects did not interact with target modality. Experiments 4 and 5 replicated this general pattern of effects while introducing a different measure of prime visibility and an orthographic priming condition. Results are interpreted within the framework of a bimodal interactive activation model.

Speech perception involves segmenting a continuous stream of speech into its word components. This can be challenging in the case of homophonous utterances only differing in non-contrastive subphonemic features. Yet, the speech perception system seems able to discriminate subphonemic deviation in homophonous utterances, since it has been shown to elicit a mismatch response (MMN). Here, we focused on the oscillatory correlates, namely phase resetting and power, of non-contrastive subphonemic deviation processing in language. An oddball task that considered natural intraspeaker variability was used. Subphonemic deviance elicited intertrial phase coherence (ITC) differences in the theta band at Fz during the time window of the MMN. No differences in power were found. This suggests that the processing of subphonemic deviation in speech signals, reflected by the MMN, might rely on mechanisms of phase resetting. ITC might facilitate the synchronous firing of functional networks involved in the processing of subphonemic deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]