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Spoken French is characterized by various linking phenomena such as « enchaînement » with and without liaison. One consequence of this is that word initial syllables are resyllabified and the phonetic onset of a word no longer corresponds to the onset of the lexical representation. Another consequence is that lexical ambiguities may arise due to enchaînement, especially when a word is pronounced with liaison. Current models of lexical access are usually based on English and therefore do not account for these linking phenomena because they occur much less often, if at all for liaison, in English. In the first part of this paper, we determine the level of lexical ambiguity caused by three types of enchaînement, one with liaison and two without, and show that enchaînement with liaison is potentially far more ambiguous than enchaînement without liaison. In the second part, we use a word detection task to show that there exists a relationship between the ambiguity of the words caused by enchaînement and their processing in real time. In the third part, we show how the temporal characteristics of the linking consonant can explain, in part, the results obtained. We end by describing how an interactive activation model can account for the access of words produced with enchaînement.
