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.

Phonological neighbors cooperate during spoken-sentence processing: Evidence from a nonword detection task.

We used a novel nonword detection task to examine the lexical competition principle postulated in most models of spoken word recognition. To do so, in Experiment 1 we presented sequences of spoken words with half of the sequences containing a nonword, and the target nonword (i.e., press a response key whenever you detect a nonword in the sequence) could either be phonologically related (a phonological neighbor) or unrelated to the immediately preceding word. We reasoned that the reactivation of a phonological neighbor during target nonword processing should delay the moment at which a nonword decision can be made. Contrary to our hypothesis, participants were faster at detecting nonwords when they were preceded by a phonological neighbor compared with an unrelated word. In Experiment 2, an inhibitory effect of phonological relatedness on nonword decisions was observed in a classic priming situation using the same set of related and unrelated word-nonword pairs. We discuss the implications of these findings in regard to the main models of spoken word recognition, and conclude that our specific experimental set-up with phonological neighbors embedded in spoken sentences is more sensitive to cooperative interactions between co-activated sublexical representations than lexical competition between co-activated lexical representations, with the latter being modulated by whether or not the words compete for the same slot in time.

Rime Priming Effects in Spoken Word Recognition.

In this study, we re-examined the facilitation that occurs when auditorily presented monosyllabic primes and targets share their final phonemes, and in particular the rime (e.g., /vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/). More specifically, we asked whether this rime facilitation effect is also observed when the two last consonants of the rime are transposed (e.g., /vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/). In comparison to a control condition in which the primes and the targets were unrelated (e.g., /pylt/-/kɔʀd/), we found significant priming effects in both the rime (/vɔdʀ/-/kɔʀd/) and the transposed-phoneme "rime" /vɔdʀ/-/kɔʀd/ conditions. We also observed a significantly greater priming effect in the former condition than in the latter condition. We use the theoretical framework of the TISK model (Hannagan et al., 2013) to propose a novel account of final overlap phonological priming in terms of activation of both position-independent phoneme representations and bi-phone representations.