Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the impact of regional variation on phoneme perception

International audienceThis event-related potential (ERP) study examined the impact of phonological variation resulting from a vowel merger on phoneme perception. The perception of the /e/–/ε/ contrast which does not exist in Southern French-speaking regions, and which is in the process of merging in Northern French-speaking regions, was compared to the /ø/–/y/ contrast, which is stable in all French-speaking regions. French-speaking participants from Switzerland for whom the /e/–/ε/ contrast is preserved, but who are exposed to different regional variants, had to perform a same-different task. They first heard four phonemically identical but acoustically different syllables (e.g., /be/–/be/–/be/–/be/), and then heard the test syllable which was either phonemically identical to (/be/) or phonemically different from (/bε/) the preceding context stimuli. The results showed that the unstable /e/–/ε/ contrast only induced a mismatch negativity (MMN), whereas the /ø/–/y/ contrast elicited both a MMN and electrophysiological differences on the P200. These findings were in line with the behavioral results in which responses were slower and more error-prone in the /e/–/ε/ deviant condition than in the /ø/–/y/ deviant condition. Together these findings suggest that the regional variability in the speech input to which listeners are exposed affects the perception of speech sounds in their own accent

The effect of phonetic production training with visual feedback on the perception and production of foreign speech sounds

Second-language learners often experience major difficulties in producing non-native speech sounds. This paper introduces a training method that uses a real-time analysis of the acoustic properties of vowels produced by non-native speakers to provide them with immediate, trial-by-trial visual feedback about their articulation alongside that of the same vowels produced by native speakers. The Mahalanobis acoustic distance between non-native productions and target native acoustic spaces was used to assess L2 production accuracy. The experiment shows that 1 h of training per vowel improves the production of four non-native Danish vowels: the learners' productions were closer to the corresponding Danish target vowels after training. The production performance of a control group remained unchanged. Comparisons of pre- and post-training vowel discrimination performance in the experimental group showed improvements in perception. Correlational analyses of training-related changes in production and perception revealed no relationship. These results suggest, first, that this training method is effective in improving non-native vowel production. Second, training purely on production improves perception. Finally, it appears that improvements in production and perception do not systematically progress at equal rates within individuals

The acquisition of pronouns by French children: A parallel study of production and comprehension

This study examines syntactic and morphological aspects of the production and comprehension of pronouns by 99 typically developing French-speaking children aged 3 years, 5 months to 6 years, 5 months. A fine structural analysis of subject, object, and reflexive clitics suggests that whereas the object clitic chain crosses the subject chain, the reflexive clitic chain is nested within it. We argue that this structural difference introduces differences in processing complexity, chain crossing being more complex than nesting. In support of this analysis, both production and comprehension experiments show that children have more difficulty with object than with reflexive clitics (with more omissions in production and more erroneous judgments in sentences involving Principle B in comprehension). Concerning the morphological aspect, French subject and object pronouns agree in gender with their referent. We report serious difficulties with pronoun gender both in production and comprehension in children around the age of 4 (with nearly 30% errors in production and chance level judgments in comprehension), which tend to disappear by age 6. The distribution of errors further suggests that the masculine gender is processed as the default value. These findings provide further insights into the relationship between comprehension and production in the acquisition proces

Cross-linguistic approaches to lexical segmentation

This paper examines the problem of lexical segmentation in order to identify language-specific and language-independent properties of lexical processing systems. A potential universal of lexical segmentation is first evaluated for its efficacy across languages. This postlexical segmentation strategy assumes that listeners recognize each word rapidly enough to be able to predict both its offset and the onset of the following word. It is argued that this strategy cannot account for every lexical segmentation decision in utterances in any language. Listeners must also use other types of segmentation information. Two types of segmentation information, distributional and relational, which appear to vary crosslinguistically, are presented with examples. To exploit this information, listeners must infer word boundaries or boundaries of other domains from events or sequences of events in the signal. The problem posed for current models of spoken word recognition by the integration of such segmentation information with that from the putative postlexical strategy is discussed. © 1985, Mouton Publishers

La syllabe comme unité de perception de la parole : un état de la question

One highly influential finding that suggests that syllabic units are instrumental in speech perception is the crossover interaction between target type and word type observed in the sequence detection task. In this paper we review our recent studies with French speakers using the same task. Overall the findings fail to replicate the "syllable effect" and indicate that the observed effects are primarily due to the time course of the arrival of phonetic information in the carrier stimuli. These data argue against an early syllabic classification mechanism in speech perception, but other results that we have obtained suggest an important role of syllable structure and more specifically onsets in speech segmentation