Can accentual phrase boundaries remove temporary lexical ambiguity in French?

Mariapaola d'Imperio (1) , Amandine Michelas (1) , Pynte Joël (2)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage
2 LPNCog FRE 3292 - Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neuropsychologie Cognitives

In French, a phonological phrase (PP) can either be isomorphic with an accentual phrase (AP) or else be produced as two separate APs, when possible. The PP has also been recently found to be directly involved in lexical access processing, in that a PP boundary might remove a temporary lexical ambiguity. In a set of two experiments, we show here that a temporary lexically ambiguous sequence can also be removed by the presence of an AP boundary. Specifically, reaction times for word monitoring were faster for ambiguous sequences when an AP boundary was present. These results suggest that tonal cues and other phonetic/phonological properties of the auditory stimuli have an impact on word recognition and must be considered for lexical access in French.

Mots clés: French; speech segmentation; lexical access; prosodic boundary; Phonological Phrase; Accentual Phrase; French.

Domaines: Linguistique

Mariapaola d'Imperio, Amandine Michelas, Pynte Joël. Can accentual phrase boundaries remove temporary lexical ambiguity in French?. Conference on Prosody and Language Processing, Apr 2008, Ithaca, France. ⟨hal-00463214⟩