How awareness of each other's mental load affects dialogue.

During dialogue, people reach mutual comprehension through the production of feedback markers such as "yeah" or "okay." The purpose of the current study was to determine if mental load affects feedback production, as there is currently no consensus as to how mental load constrains the way in which dialogue partners reach mutual comprehension. In two experiments, pairs of participants interacted in order to complete a collaborative puzzle game.

Between alpha and gamma oscillations: Neural signatures of linguistic predictions and listener's attention to speaker's communication intention.

When listeners hear a message produced by their interlocutor, they can predict upcoming words thanks to the sentential context and their attention can be focused on the speaker's communication intention. In two electroencephalographical (EEG) studies, we investigated the oscillatory correlates of prediction in spoken-language comprehension and how they are modulated by the listener's attention. Sentential contexts which were strongly predictive of a particular word were ended by a possessive adjective either matching the gender of the predicted word or not.

A modified procedure for naming 332 pictures and collecting norms: Using tangram pictures in psycholinguistic studies.

Tangram pictures are abstract pictures which may be used as stimuli in various fields of experimental psychology and are often used in the field of dialogue psychology. The present study provides the first norms for a set of 332 tangram pictures. These pictures were standardized on a set of variables classically used in the literature on cognitive processes, such as visual perception, language, and memory: name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition.

Oscillatory correlates of linguistic prediction and modality effects during listening to auditory-only and audiovisual sentences.

In natural listening situations, understanding spoken sentences requires interactions between several multisensory to linguistic levels of information. In two electroencephalographical studies, we examined the neuronal oscillations of linguistic prediction produced by unimodal and bimodal sentence listening to observe how these brain correlates were affected by the sensory streams delivering linguistic information. Sentence contexts which were strongly predictive of a particular word were ended by a possessive adjective matching or not the gender of the predicted word.

Audiovisual speech segmentation in post-stroke aphasia: a pilot study.

: Stroke may cause sentence comprehension disorders. Speech segmentation, i.e.

The influence of sex information into spoken words: a mismatch negativity (MMN) study.

When exposed to a spoken message, a listener takes into account several sources of linguistic and indexical information. Using the mismatch negativity (MMN) response, we examined whether the indexical information about the sex of the speaker influenced the processing of semantically gendered spoken words. Female participants listened two semantically gendered French words, one masculine and one feminine representing human beings, said either by five male or by five female speakers.

Co-occurrence frequency evaluated with large language corpora boosts semantic priming effects.

In recent decades, many computational techniques have been developed to analyse the contextual usage of words in large language corpora. The present study examined whether the co-occurrence frequency obtained from large language corpora might boost purely semantic priming effects. Two experiments were conducted: one with conscious semantic priming, the other with subliminal semantic priming.

The interplay between semantic and phonological constraints during spoken-word comprehension.

This study addresses how top-down predictions driven by phonological and semantic information interact on spoken-word comprehension. To do so, we measured event-related potentials to words embedded in sentences that varied in the degree of semantic constraint (high or low) and in regional accent (congruent or incongruent) with respect to the target word pronunciation. The data showed a negative amplitude shift following phonological mismatch (target pronunciation incongruent with respect to sentence regional accent).

Visual information constrains early and late stages of spoken-word recognition in sentence context.

Audiovisual speech perception has been frequently studied considering phoneme, syllable and word processing levels. Here, we examined the constraints that visual speech information might exert during the recognition of words embedded in a natural sentence context. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to words that could be either strongly or weakly predictable on the basis of the prior semantic sentential context and, whose initial phoneme varied in the degree of visual saliency from lip movements.

The speakers' accent shapes the listeners' phonological predictions during speech perception.

This study investigates the specificity of predictive coding in spoken word comprehension using event-related potentials (ERPs). We measured word-evoked ERPs in Catalan speakers listening to semantically constraining sentences produced in their native regional accent (experiment 1) or in a non-native accent (experiment 2). Semantically anomalous words produced long-lasting negative shift (N400) starting as early as 250 ms, thus reflecting phonological as well as semantic mismatch.

Tracking the time course of word-frequency effects in auditory word recognition with event-related potentials.

Although the word-frequency effect is one of the most established findings in spoken-word recognition, the precise processing locus of this effect is still a topic of debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of the word-frequency effect. In addition, the neighborhood density effect, which is known to reflect mechanisms involved in word identification, was also examined.

Does imitation facilitate word recognition in a non-native regional accent?

We asked to what extent phonetic convergence across speakers may facilitate later word recognition. Northern-French participants showed both a clear phonetic convergence effect toward Southern French in a word repetition task, and a bias toward the phonemic system of their own variety in the recognition of single words. Perceptual adaptation to a non-native accent may be difficult when the native accent has a phonemic contrast that is associated with a single phonemic category in the non-native accent.

To what extent do we hear phonemic contrasts in a non-native regional variety? Tracking the dynamics of perceptual processing with EEG.

This combined ERP and behavioral experiment explores the dynamics of processing during the discrimination of vowels in a non-native regional variety. Southern listeners were presented with three word forms, two of which are encountered in both Standard and Southern French ([kot] and [kut]), whereas the third one exists in Standard but not Southern French ([kot]). EEG recordings suggest that all of the word pairs were discriminated by the listeners, although discrimination arose about 100ms later for the pairs which included the non-native word form than for those which contained word forms common to both French varieties.

Regional differences in the listener's phonemic inventory affect semantic processing: A mismatch negativity (MMN) study.

Using the mismatch negativity (MMN) response, we examined how Standard French and Southern French speakers access the meaning of words ending in /e/ or /ε/ vowels which are contrastive in Standard French but not in Southern French. In Standard French speakers, there was a significant difference in the amplitude of the brain response after the deviant-minus-standard subtraction between the frontocentral (FC) and right lateral (RL) recording sites for the final-/ε/ word but not the final-/e/ word. In contrast, the difference in the amplitude of the brain response between the FC and RL recording sites did not significantly vary as a function of the word's final vowel in Southern French speakers.

Brain response to subject-verb agreement during grammatical priming.

In this study, we explored cerebral mechanisms during the computation of subject-verb agreement by measuring event-related potentials after French verb and pseudoverb targets preceded by various contexts. In auditory grammatical priming, the targets were either related to a congruent predictive pronoun prime (nous prêtons we lend) or an incongruent predictive pronoun prime (vous prêtons you lend) or a nonpredictive prime (zous prêtons zous lend). Whereas an early anterior negativity (LAN) and a parietal positivity were modulated by the preceding context for verb targets, only the early negativity was sensitive to the context for pseudoverb targets.

Pre-attentive and attentive processing of French vowels.

This study aimed at investigating the effects of acoustic distance and of speaker variability on the pre-attentive and attentive perception of French vowels by French adult speakers. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants watched a silent movie (Passive condition) and discriminated deviant vowels (Active condition). The auditory sequence included 4 French vowels, /u/ (standard) and /o/, /y/ and /ø/ as deviants, produced by 3 different speakers.

Mismatch negativity: a tool for studying morphosyntactic processing?

Objective: Mismatch negativity (MMN) was originally shown in a passive auditory oddball paradigm to be generated by any acoustical change. More recently, it has been applied to the study of higher order linguistic levels including the morphosyntactic level in spoken language comprehension. In this study, we present two MMN experiments to determine whether morphosyntactic features are involved in the representations underlying the morphosyntactic processing.

Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the impact of regional variation on phoneme perception.

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the impact of phonological variation resulting from a vowel merger on phoneme perception. The perception of the /e/-/epsilon/ contrast which does not exist in Southern French-speaking regions, and which is in the process of merging in Northern French-speaking regions, was compared to the /ø/-/y/ contrast, which is stable in all French-speaking regions. French-speaking participants from Switzerland for whom the /e/-/epsilon/ contrast is preserved, but who are exposed to different regional variants, had to perform a same-different task.

Early and automatic syntactic processing of person agreement.

Mismatch negativity, an index of automatic cerebral activity in response to novel stimuli, was used to determine the onset of morphosyntactic processing in French. Stimuli were four two-word sentences made up of a pronoun (first or second person) and a verb (first or second person). Verb forms differed only in the inflectional suffix, which made the sentences either syntactically correct or incorrect.

ERP correlates of lexical analysis: N280 reflects processing complexity rather than category or frequency effects.

In the context of language processing, the N280 is an anterior negative event-related potential profile associated with the lexical categorization of grammatical function words versus content words. Subsequent studies suggested that this effect was related to word statistics including length and frequency in the lexicon. The current research tests the hypothesis that the N280 effect is related to an index of grammatical complexity.