Abstract:
Information on word recognition and lexical access has been dominated by research on English. In French, with its different prosodic coding, showing the phonological processes of liaison, enchainement, and e-deletion, represents an opportunity to widen the understanding of speech recognition. A listening test was carried out containing 20 utterances and ten distractors ranging from one to six syllables and forming seven pairs and two triplets of supposedly ``identical'' linguistic phrases. A representative sample of each type produced by a male and a female French speaker was presented five times in random order to 18 native listeners of French (including the two speakers) and nine Swedish learners of French as a foreign language. No group identified any of the original utterances correctly, and only two pairs of stimuli were identified at random. Taking into account the frequencies of the stimuli, it appears that most stimuli contain some acoustic information that guides recognition. An acoustic analysis of these utterances showed prosodic and, what might be considered unexpected, according to the literature, segmental differences in spectrum amplitude and F0. [Work supported by the Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences.]