English listeners’ use of distributional and acoustic phonetic cues to liaison in French: evidence from eye movements  

Oleh:

Tremblay, Annie ; Spinelli, Elsa

Jenis: Article from Journal
Dalam koleksi: Language And Speech vol. 57 no. 03 (Sep. 2014), page 310-337.
Topik: Second language speech segmentation; French; liaison; distributional cues; acoustic-phonetic cues
Fulltext: English Listeners' Use of Distributional and Acoustic-Phonetic.pdf (489.42KB)

Isi artikel

This study investigates English listeners’ use of distributional and acoustic-phonetic cues to liaison in French. Liaison creates a misalignment of the syllable and word boundaries, but is signaled by distributional cues (/z/ is a frequent liaison but not a frequent word onset; /t/ is a frequent word onset but a less frequent liaison) and acoustic-phonetic cues (liaison consonants are 15 per cent shorter than word-initial consonants). English-speaking French learners completed a visual world eye-tracking experiment in which they heard adjective-noun sequences where the pivotal consonant was /t/ (expected advantage for consonant-initial words) or /z/ (expected advantage for liaison-initial words). Their results were compared to those of native French speakers. Both groups showed an advantage for consonant-initial targets with /t/ but no advantage for consonant- or liaison-initial targets with /z/. Both groups’ competitor fixations were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant, but only the learners’ fixations to liaison-initial targets were modulated by the duration of the pivotal consonant. This suggests that English listeners use both top-down (distributional) and bottom-up (acoustic-phonetic) cues to liaison in French. Their greater reliance on acoustic-phonetic cues is hypothesized to stem in part from English, where such cues play an important role for locating word boundaries.

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