On the perception of stress position by French listeners: An EEG investigation.

In this EEG study, we examined the ability of French listeners to perceive and use the position of stress in a discrimination task. Event-Related-Potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a same-different task. Different stimuli diverged either in one phoneme (e.g., /ʒy'ʁi/-/ʒy'ʁɔ̃/) or in stress position (e.g., /ʒy'ʁi/-/'ʒyʁi/). Although participants reached 93% of correct responses, ERP results indicated that a change in stress position was not detected while a change in one phoneme elicited a MisMatchNegativity (MMN) response. It results that in the early moments of speech processing, stimuli that are phonemically identical but that differ in stress position are perceived as being strictly similar. We concluded that the good performance observed in behavioral responses on stress position contrasts are due to attentional/decisional processes linked to discrimination tasks, and not to automatic and unconscious processes involved in stress position processing.

Does accentual variation in the pronunciation of French words influence their recognition? It depends on the ear of presentation.

This repetition priming study examined how word accentual variation in French is represented and processed during spoken word recognition. Mismatched primes in the accentual pattern were less effective than matched primes in facilitating target word recognition when the targets were presented in the left ear but not in the right ear. This indicates that in French, the accentual pattern of words influences their recognition when processing is constrained in the right hemisphere. This study pleads in favor of two memory systems, the one retaining words in an abstract format and the other retaining words in their various forms.

The Same Ultra-Rapid Parallel Brain Dynamics Underpin the Production and Perception of Speech.

The temporal dynamics by which linguistic information becomes available is one of the key properties to understand how language is organized in the brain. An unresolved debate between different brain language models is whether words, the building blocks of language, are activated in a sequential or parallel manner. In this study, we approached this issue from a novel perspective by directly comparing the time course of word component activation in speech production versus perception. In an overt object naming task and a passive listening task, we analyzed with mixed linear models at the single-trial level the event-related brain potentials elicited by the same lexico-semantic and phonological word knowledge in the two language modalities. Results revealed that both word components manifested simultaneously as early as 75 ms after stimulus onset in production and perception; differences between the language modalities only became apparent after 300 ms of processing. The data provide evidence for ultra-rapid parallel dynamics of language processing and are interpreted within a neural assembly framework where words recruit the same integrated cell assemblies across production and perception. These word assemblies ignite early on in parallel and only later on reverberate in a behavior-specific manner.

Focus Marking and Prosodic Boundary Strength in French.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: In French, the size of a focus constituent is not reliably marked through pitch accent assignment as in many stress accent languages. While it has been argued that the distribution of lower-level prosodic boundaries plays a role, this is at best a weak cue to focus, leaving open the question of whether other marking strategies are available. In this study, we assess whether the right edge of a contrastive focus constituent is marked by differences in prosodic boundary strength. METHODS: We elicited utterances with target words in six combinations of focus and syntactic contexts using an interactive production task. RESULTS: The results show that if a given location is realized as an accentual phrase boundary in an all-focus context, then it is realized as an intermediate phrase boundary when it coincides with the right edge of a narrow-focus constituent. A location that is an intermediate phrase boundary in an all-focus context, however, remains unchanged under narrow focus. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that focus constituents are constrained to align with a minimum prosodic domain size in French (i.e., the intermediate phrase), and that French does not rely on a general strategy of prosodic enhancement for marking focus.

Are Prosodic Variants Stored in the French Mental Lexicon?

A long-term priming experiment examined the way stress information is processed and represented in French speakers' mind. Repeated prime and target words either matched (/bã'do/ - /bã'do/ "headband") or mismatched their stress pattern (/bãdo/ - /bã'do/). In comparison to a control condition (/maʁ[Formula: see text]/ - /bã'do/), the results showed that matching and mismatching primes were equally effective in facilitating the processing of the target words. Thus, despite the fact that French speakers routinely produce and hear words in their stressed and unstressed versions, this study suggests that stress in French is not integrated into lexical representations.

The impact of shared knowledge on speakers' prosody.

How does the knowledge shared by interlocutors during interaction modify the way speakers speak? Specifically, how does prosody change when speakers know that their addressees do not share the same knowledge as them? We studied these effects in an interactive paradigm in which French speakers gave instructions to addressees about where to place a cross between different objects (e.g., You put the cross between the red mouse and the red house). We manipulated (i) whether the two interlocutors shared or did not necessarily share the same objects and (ii) the informational status of referents. We were interested in two types of prosodic variations: global prosodic variations that affect entire utterances (i.e., pitch range and speech rate variations) and more local prosodic variations that encode informational status of referents (i.e., prosodic phrasing for French). We found that participants spoke more slowly and with larger pitch excursions in the not-shared knowledge condition than in the shared knowledge condition while they did not prosodically encode the informational status of referents regardless of the knowledge condition. Results demonstrated that speakers kept track of what the addressee knew, and that they adapted their global prosody to their interlocutors. This made the task too cognitively demanding to allow the prosodic encoding of the informational status of referents. Our findings are in line with the idea that complex reasoning usually implicated in constructing a model of the addressee co-exists with speaker-internal constraints such as cognitive load to affect speaker's prosody during interaction.

When pitch Accents Encode Speaker Commitment: Evidence from French Intonation.

Recent studies on a variety of languages have shown that a speaker's commitment to the propositional content of his or her utterance can be encoded, among other strategies, by pitch accent types. Since prior research mainly relied on lexical-stress languages, our understanding of how speakers of a non-lexical-stress language encode speaker commitment is limited. This paper explores the contribution of the last pitch accent of an intonation phrase to convey speaker commitment in French, a language that has stress at the phrasal level as well as a restricted set of pitch accents. In a production experiment, participants had to produce sentences in two pragmatic contexts: unbiased questions (the speaker had no particular belief with respect to the expected answer) and negatively biased questions (the speaker believed the proposition to be false). Results revealed that negatively biased questions consistently exhibited an additional unaccented F0 peak in the preaccentual syllable (an H+!H* pitch accent) while unbiased questions were often realized with a rising pattern across the accented syllable (an H* pitch accent). These results provide evidence that pitch accent types in French can signal the speaker's belief about the certainty of the proposition expressed in French. It also has implications for the phonological model of French intonation.

How deaf are French speakers to stress?

This event-related potential study examined whether French listeners use stress at a phonological level when discriminating between stressed and unstressed words in their language. Participants heard five words and made same/different decisions about the final word (male voice) with respect to the four preceding words (different female voices). Compared to the first four context words, the target word was (i) phonemically and prosodically identical (/ʃu/-/ʃu/; control condition), (ii) phonemically identical but differing in the presence of a primary stress (/ʃu'/-/ʃu/), (iii) prosodically identical but phonemically different (/ʃo/-/ʃu/), or (iv) both phonemically and prosodically different (/ʃo'/-/ʃu/). Crucially, differences on the P200 and the following N200 components were observed for the /ʃu'/-/ʃu/ and the /ʃo/-/ʃu/ conditions compared to the /ʃu/-/ʃu/ control condition. Moreover, on the N200 component more negativity was observed for the /ʃo/-/ʃu/ condition compared to the /ʃu'/-/ʃu/ conditions, while no difference emerged between these two conditions on the earlier P200 component. Crucially, the results suggest that French listeners are capable of creating an abstract representation of stress. However, as they receive more input, participants react more strongly to phonemic than to stress information.

Do patients with schizophrenia use prosody to encode contrastive discourse status?

Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) often display social cognition disorders, including Theory of Mind (ToM) impairments and communication disruptions. Thought language disorders appear to be primarily a disruption of pragmatics, SZ can also experience difficulties at other linguistic levels including the prosodic one. Here, using an interactive paradigm, we showed that SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode the contrastive status of discourse referents in French. We used a semi-spontaneous task to elicit noun-adjective pairs in which the noun in the second noun-adjective fragment was identical to the noun in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron "brown candies" vs. BONBONS violets "purple candies") or could contrast with it (e.g., BOUGIES violettes "purple candles" vs. BONBONS violets "purple candies"). We found that healthy controls parsed the target noun in the second noun-adjective fragment separately from the color adjective, to warn their interlocutor that this noun constituted a contrastive entity (e.g., BOUGIES violettes followed by [BONBONS] [violets]) compared to when it referred to the same object as in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron followed by [BONBONS violets]). On the contrary, SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode contrastive status of target nouns. In addition, SZ's difficulties to use prosody of contrast were correlated to their score in a classical ToM task (i.e., the hinting task). Taken together, our data provide evidence that SZ patients exhibit difficulties to prosodically encode discourse statuses and sketch a potential relationship between ToM and the use of linguistic prosody.