Where Is the /b/ in 'absurde' [apsyrd]? It Is in French Listeners' Minds

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.”