Acceso usuarios
Three experiments are reported concerning the relative contributions of metrical and phonotactic segmentation cues to listeners' word recognition in French. Listeners had to detect monosyllabic words embedded at the initial position in nonsense bisyllabic strings that were realized as an iambe, typical in French for bisyllabic words, a trochee, or a spondee. Experiment 1 extended the effect of metrical cues to the sequences with two non-coarticulated consonants in the medial position. Word detection was faster for a trochaic pattern than for either an iambic pattern or a neutral spondee. Comparing the effects of cooperating cues and of conflicting cues on detection times, Experiment 2 found neither interference nor interaction between the phonotactic and prosodie speech dimensions, but a redundancy gain in the trochaic condition for both phonotactic conditions. A control experiment studied the recognition of words extracted from the bisyllabic sequences. It showed no effect of previous context on word recognition. These results are discussed in terms of timing mechanisms that may operate either at the level of syllable perception, or as the basis of a prosodie parsing routine. They indicate that phonotactic and metrical cues are processed separately.
