The present study investigated whether lexical access is affected by a regular phonological variation in connected speech: voice assimilation in French. Two associative priming experiments were conducted to determine whether strongly assimilated, potentially ambiguous word forms activate the conceptual representation of the underlying word. Would the ambiguous word form [sud] (either assimilated soute 'hold' or soude 'soda') facilitate 'bagage' 'luggage', which is semantically related to soute but not to soude? In Experiment 1, words in either canonical or strongly assimilated form (...) were presented as primes. Both forms primed their related target to the same extent. Potential lexical ambiguity did not modulate priming effects. In Experiment 2, the primes such as assimilated soute pronounced [sud] used in Experiment 1 were replaced with primes such as soude canonically pronounced [sud]. No semantic priming effect was obtained with these primes. Therefore, the effect observed for assimilated forms in Experiment 1 cannot be due to overall phonological proximity between canonical and assimilated forms. We propose that listeners must recover the intended words behind the assimilated forms through the exploitation of the remaining traces of the underlying form, however subtle these traces may be. (shrink)

In a series of 5 experiments, we investigated whether the processing of phonologically assimilated utterances is influenced by language learning. Previous experiments had shown that phonological assimilations, such as /lean#bacon/→ [leam bacon], are compensated for in perception. In this article, we investigated whether compensation for assimilation can occur without experience with an assimilation rule using automatic event-related potentials. Our first experiment indicated that Dutch listeners compensate for a Hungarian assimilation rule. Two subsequent experiments, however, failed to show compensation for assimilation (...) by both Dutch and Hungarian listeners. Two additional experiments showed that this was due to the acoustic properties of the assimilated utterance, confirming earlier reports that phonetic detail is important in compensation for assimilation. Our data indicate that compensation for assimilation can occur without experience with an assimilation rule, in line with phonetic-phonological theories that assume that speech production is influenced by speech-perception abilities. (shrink)

A number of recent studies have examined the effects of phonological variation on the perception of speech. These studies show that both the lexical representations of words and the mechanisms of lexical access are organized so that natural, systematic variation is tolerated by the perceptual system, while a general intolerance of random deviation is maintained. Lexical abstraction distinguishes between phonetic features that form the invariant core of a word and those that are susceptible to variation. Phonological inference relies on the (...) context of surface changes to retrieve the underlying phonological form. In this article we present a model of these processes in speech perception, based on connectionist learning techniques. A simple recurrent network was trained on the mapping from the variant surface form of speech to the underlying form. Once trained, the network exhibited features of both abstraction and inference in its processing of normal speech, and predicted that similar behavior will be found in the perception of nonsense words. This prediction was confirmed in subsequent research (Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1994). (shrink)

In three experiments, we examined priming effects where primes were formed by transposing the first and last phoneme of tri‐phonemic target words (e.g., /byt/ as a prime for /tyb/). Auditory lexical decisions were found not to be sensitive to this transposed‐phoneme priming manipulation in long‐term priming (Experiment 1), with primes and targets presented in two separated blocks of stimuli and with unrelated primes used as control condition (/mul/‐/tyb/), while a long‐term repetition priming effect was observed (/tyb/‐/tyb/). However, a clear transposed‐phoneme (...) priming effect was found in two short‐term priming experiments (Experiments 2 and 3), with primes and targets presented in close temporal succession. The transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found when unrelated prime‐target pairs (/mul/‐/tyb/) were used as control and more important when prime‐target pairs sharing the medial vowel (/pys/‐/tyb/) served as control condition, thus indicating that the effect is not due to vocalic overlap. Finally, in Experiment 3, a transposed‐phoneme priming effect was found when primes sharing the medial vowel plus one consonant in an incorrect position with the targets (/byl/‐/tyb/) served as control condition, and this condition did not differ significantly from the vowel‐only condition. Altogether, these results provide further evidence for a role for position‐independent phonemes in spoken word recognition, such that a phoneme at a given position in a word also provides evidence for the presence of words that contain that phoneme at a different position. (shrink)