Neutral is not fair enough: testing the efficiency of different language gender-fair strategies.

In many languages with grammatical gender, the use of masculine forms as a generic reference has been associated with a bias favoring masculine-specific representations. This article examines the efficiency of gender-fair forms, specifically gender-unmarked forms (neutralization strategy, e.g.

Prosodic cues to word boundaries in a segmentation task assessed using reverse correlation.

When listening to speech sounds, listeners are able to exploit acoustic features that mark the boundaries between successive words, the so-called segmentation cues. These cues are typically investigated by directly manipulating features that are hypothetically related to segmentation. The current study uses a different approach based on reverse correlation, where the stimulus manipulations are based on minimal assumptions.

Influence of homophone processing during auditory language comprehension on executive control processes: A dual-task paradigm.

In the present preregistered study, we evaluated the possibility of a shared cognitive mechanism during verbal and non-verbal tasks and therefore the implication of domain-general cognitive control during language comprehension. We hypothesized that a behavioral cost will be observed during a dual-task including both verbal and non-verbal difficult processing. Specifically, to test this claim, we designed a dual-task paradigm involving: an auditory language comprehension task (sentence comprehension) and a non-verbal Flanker task (including congruent and incongruent trials).

Orthography and second language word learning: Moving beyond "friend or foe?".

French participants learned English pseudowords either with the orthographic form displayed under the corresponding picture (Audio-Ortho) or without (Audio). In a naming task, pseudowords learned in the Audio-Ortho condition were produced faster and with fewer errors, providing a first piece of evidence that orthographic information facilitates the learning and on-line retrieval of productive vocabulary in a second language. Formant analyses, however, showed that productions from the Audio-Ortho condition were more French-like (i.

Syntactic Cues Take Precedence Over Distributional Cues in Native and Non-Native Speech Segmentation.

This study investigates whether syntactic cues take precedence over distributional cues in native and non-native speech segmentation by examining native and non-native speech segmentation in potential French-liaison contexts. Native French listeners and English-speaking second-language learners of French completed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment. Half the stimuli contained the pivotal consonant /t/, a frequent word onset but infrequent liaison consonant, and half contained /z/, a frequent liaison consonant but rare word onset.

MEGALEX: A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition.

Using the megastudy approach, we report a new database (MEGALEX) of visual and auditory lexical decision times and accuracy rates for tens of thousands of words. We collected visual lexical decision data for 28,466 French words and the same number of pseudowords, and auditory lexical decision data for 17,876 French words and the same number of pseudowords (synthesized tokens were used for the auditory modality). This constitutes the first large-scale database for auditory lexical decision, and the first database to enable a direct comparison of word recognition in different modalities.

Experience with a second language affects the use of fundamental frequency in speech segmentation.

This study investigates whether listeners' experience with a second language learned later in life affects their use of fundamental frequency (F0) as a cue to word boundaries in the segmentation of an artificial language (AL), particularly when the cues to word boundaries conflict between the first language (L1) and second language (L2). F0 signals phrase-final (and thus word-final) boundaries in French but word-initial boundaries in English. Participants were functionally monolingual French listeners, functionally monolingual English listeners, bilingual L1-English L2-French listeners, and bilingual L1-French L2-English listeners.

Orofacial electromyographic correlates of induced verbal rumination.

Rumination is predominantly experienced in the form of repetitive verbal thoughts. Verbal rumination is a particular case of inner speech. According to the Motor Simulation view, inner speech is a kind of motor action, recruiting the speech motor system.

Diphones-fr: a French database of diphone positional frequency.

The aim of this article is to describe a database of diphone positional frequencies in French. More specifically, we provide frequencies for word-initial, word-internal, and word-final diphones of all words extracted from a subtitle corpus of 50 million words that come from movie and TV series dialogue. We also provide intra- and intersyllable diphone frequencies, as well as interword diphone frequencies.

Processing prefixes and suffixes in handwriting production.

Previous research showed that handwriting production is mediated by linguistically oriented processing units such as syllables and graphemes. The goal of this study was to investigate whether French adults also activate another kind of unit that is more related to semantics than phonology, namely morphemes. Experiment 1 revealed that letter duration and inter-letter intervals were longer for suffixed words than for pseudo-suffixed words.

Processing complex graphemes in handwriting production.

Recent studies on handwriting production and neuropsychological data have suggested that orthographic representations are multilevel structures that encode information on letter identity and order, but also on intermediate-grained processing units such as syllables and morphemes. This study on handwriting production examined whether orthographic representations also include a graphemic-processing level. French adults wrote words containing an embedded one-, two-, or three-letter grapheme (e.

An intonational cue to word segmentation in phonemically identical sequences.

We investigated the use of language-specific intonational cues to word segmentation in French. Participants listened to phonemically identical sequences such as /selafi/, C'est la fiche/l'affiche "It's the sheet/poster." We modified the f0 of the first vowel /a/ of the natural consonant-initial production la fiche, so that it was equal to that of the natural vowel-initial production l'affiche (resynth-consonant-equal condition), higher (resynth-consonant-higher condition), or lower (resynth-consonant-lower condition).

Usage-based account of the acquisition of liaison: evidence from sensitivity to the singular/plural orientation of nouns.

This study investigates whether children's production and recognition of obligatory liaison sequences in French depend on the singular/plural orientation of nouns. Certain nouns occur more frequently in the plural (e.g.

The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French.

The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children.

Phonotactic constraints help to overcome effects of schwa deletion in French.

In a crossmodal priming experiment, visual targets (e.g. RENARD, 'fox') were auditorily primed by either an intact [see text] 'the fox' or reduced form [see text] 'the fox' of the word.

Masked repetition and phonological priming within and across modalities.

Lexical decision latencies to word targets presented either visually or auditorily were faster when directly preceded by a briefly presented (53-ms) pattern-masked visual prime that was the same word as the target (repetition primes), compared with different word primes. Primes that were pseudohomophones of target words did not significantly influence target processing compared with unrelated primes (Experiments 1-2) but did produce robust priming effects with slightly longer prime exposures (67 ms) in Experiment 3. Like repetition priming, these pseudohomophone priming effects did not interact with target modality.

Perception of resyllabification in French.

In three experiments, we examined the effects of phonological resyllabification processes on the perception of French speech. Enchainment involves the resyllabification of a word-final consonant across a syllable boundary (e.g.