Jacques Mehler's early psycholinguistic days in Paris.

This article first describes Jacques Mehler's initial efforts to make psycholinguistics and, more generally, the cognitive sciences better known during his first years in Paris. Two lines of research on sentence perception, that we conducted in collaboration with Jacques, are then presented to illustrate his focus. In the Seventies, sentence perception was a central topic in psycholinguistics, with contrasting proposals of syntactic autonomy and interactivity being confronted.

Relationship between working memory and complex syntax in children with Developmental Language Disorder.

Some theories of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) explain the linguistic deficits observed in terms of limitations in non-linguistic cognitive systems such as working memory. The goal of this research is to clarify the relationship between working memory and the processing of complex sentences by exploring the performance of 28 French-speaking children with DLD aged five to fourteen years and 48 typically developing children of the same age in memory and linguistic tasks. We identified predictive relationships between working memory and the comprehension and repetition of complex sentences in both groups.

How much does orthography influence the processing of reduced word forms? Evidence from novel-word learning about French schwa deletion.

This study examines the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms. For this purpose, we compared the impact of phonological variation with the impact of spelling-sound consistency on the processing of words that may be produced with or without the vowel schwa. Participants learnt novel French words in which the vowel schwa was present or absent in the first syllable.

Lexical Segmentation in Artificial Word Learning: The Effects of Converging Sublexical Cues.

This study examines how French listeners segment and learn new words of artificial languages varying in the presence of different combinations of sublexical segmentation cues. The first experiment investigated the contribution of three different types of sublexical cues (acoustic-phonetic, phonological and prosodic cues) to word learning. The second experiment explored how participants specifically exploited sublexical prosodic cues.

Does orthographic training on a phonemic contrast absent in the listener's dialect influence word recognition?

This study examined whether the ability of southern French speakers to discriminate between standard French word forms such as /pike/ and /pikε/ can be improved by a training procedure in which participants were exposed to the orthographic representations of words forming /e/-/ε/ minimal pairs. The results of the training procedure showed that southern French speakers were able to perceive the /e/-/ε/ contrast in word final position when they associated words containing these vowels with their correct spelled form. Further, participants in a priming experiment, which was run immediately after training, no longer showed the priming effect on the trained minimal pairs that they had shown in the pre-test.

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/).

On the resolution of phonological constraints in spoken production: Acoustic and response time evidence.

This study examines the production of words the pronunciation of which depends on the phonological context. Participants produced adjective-noun phrases starting with the French determiner un. The pronunciation of this determiner requires a liaison consonant before vowels.

The effect of phonetic production training with visual feedback on the perception and production of foreign speech sounds.

Second-language learners often experience major difficulties in producing non-native speech sounds. This paper introduces a training method that uses a real-time analysis of the acoustic properties of vowels produced by non-native speakers to provide them with immediate, trial-by-trial visual feedback about their articulation alongside that of the same vowels produced by native speakers. The Mahalanobis acoustic distance between non-native productions and target native acoustic spaces was used to assess L2 production accuracy.

Inhibitory phonetic priming: Where does the effect come from?

Both phonological and phonetic priming studies reveal inhibitory effects that have been interpreted as resulting from lexical competition between the prime and the target. We present a series of phonetic priming experiments that contrasted this lexical locus explanation with that of a prelexical locus by manipulating the lexical status of the prime and the target and the task used. In the related condition of all experiments, spoken targets were preceded by spoken primes that were phonetically similar but shared no phonemes with the target (/bak/-/dεt/).

Functional and time-course changes in single word production from childhood to adulthood.

Picture naming tasks are widely used both in children and adults to investigate language production for research and for assessment purposes. The main theoretical models of single word production based on the investigation of picture naming in adults provide a detailed account of the principal mental operations involved in the transformation of an abstract concept into articulated speech and their temporal dynamics. These models and in particular their time-course do not apply directly to children who display much longer production latencies than adults.

On the effects of L2 perception and of individual differences in L1 production on L2 pronunciation.

The speech of late second language (L2) learners is generally marked by an accent. The dominant theoretical perspective attributes accents to deficient L2 perception arising from a transfer of L1 phonology, which is thought to influence L2 perception and production. In this study we evaluate the explanatory role of L2 perception in L2 production and explore alternative explanations arising from the L1 phonological system, such as for example, the role of L1 production.

Facilitatory and interfering effects of neighbourhood density on speech production: evidence from aphasic errors.

In a system where tens of thousands of words are made up of a limited number of phonemes, many words are bound to sound alike. This similarity of the words in the lexicon as characterized by phonological neighbourhood density (PhND) has been shown to affect speed and accuracy of word comprehension and production. Whereas there is a consensus about the interfering nature of neighbourhood effects in comprehension, the language production literature offers a more contradictory picture with mainly facilitatory but also interfering effects reported on word production.

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.

Phonological Specificity in 12- and 17-Month-Old French-Speaking Infants.

The literature reports some contradictory results on the degree of phonological specificity of infants' early lexical representations in the Romance language, French, and Germanic languages. It is not clear whether these discrepancies are because of differences in method, in language characteristics, or in participants' age. In this study, we examined whether 12- and 17-month-old French-speaking infants are able to distinguish well-pronounced from mispronounced words (one or two features of their initial consonant).

Producing and recognizing words with two pronunciation variants: evidence from novel schwa words.

This study examined the lexical representations and psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the production and recognition of novel words with two pronunciation variants in French. Participants first learned novel schwa words (e.g.

What affects the presence versus absence of schwa and its duration: a corpus analysis of French connected speech.

This study presents an analysis of over 4000 tokens of words produced as variants with and without schwa in a French corpus of radio-broadcasted speech. In order to determine which of the many variables mentioned in the literature influence variant choice, 17 predictors were tested in the same analysis. Only five of these variables appeared to condition variant choice.

Does training on a phonemic contrast absent in the listener's dialect influence word recognition?

Southern French listeners were trained on the word final Standard French /e/-/epsilon/ contrast that does not exist in their dialect. They learned to associate minimal pairs of new words with visual shapes. Although final training session performance was relatively high, the learning did not transfer to a lexical decision task with phonological priming.

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.

Phonological neighbourhood effects in French spoken-word recognition.

According to activation-based models of spoken-word recognition, words with many and high-frequency phonological neighbours are processed more slowly than words with few and low-frequency phonological neighbours. Although considerable empirical support for inhibitory neighbourhood density effects has accumulated, especially in English, little or nothing is known about the effects of neighbourhood frequency and its interaction with neighbourhood density. In this study we examine both effects first separately and then simultaneously in French lexical decision experiments.

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.

Phonological regularities and grammatical gender retrieval in spoken word recognition and word production.

Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun's phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed a gender decision task on the noun's gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected.

Vowel aperture and syllable segmentation in French.

The theories of Pulgram (1970) suggest that if the vowel of a French syllable is open then it will induce syllable segmentation responses that result in the syllable being closed, and vice versa. After the empirical verification that our target French-speaking population was capable of distinguishing between mid-vowel aperture, we examined the relationship between vowel and syllable aperture in two segmentation experiments. Initial findings from a metalinguistic repetition task supported the hypothesis, revealing significant segmentation differences due to vowel aperture across a range of bi-syllabic stimuli.

The perception of phonemic contrasts in a non-native dialect.

This study examined the impact on speech processing of regional phonetic/phonological variation in the listener's native language. The perception of the /e/-/epsilon/ and /o/-/upside down c/ contrasts, produced by standard but not southern French native speakers, was investigated in these two populations. A repetition priming experiment showed that the latter but not the former perceived words such as /epe/ and /epepsilon/ as homophones.

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.

Agreement and movement: a syntactic analysis of attraction.

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject-verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of 'attraction' errors (i.