Hostname: page-component-76c49bb84f-vcmr7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-11T21:38:05.984Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Learning to parse liaison-initial words: An eye-tracking study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2011

ANNIE TREMBLAY
ANNIE TREMBLAY*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
Address for correspondence: 2090 Foreign Language Building, 707 S. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801USAatrembla@illinois.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study investigates the processing of resyllabified words by native English speakers at three proficiency levels in French and by native French speakers. In particular, it examines non-native listeners’ development of a parsing procedure for recognizing vowel-initial words in the context of liaison, a process that creates a misalignment of the syllable and word boundaries in French. The participants completed an eye-tracking experiment in which they identified liaison- and consonant-initial real and nonce words in auditory stimuli. The results show that the non-native listeners had little difficulty recognizing liaison-initial real words, and they recognized liaison-initial nonce words more rapidly than consonant-initial ones. By contrast, native listeners recognized consonant-initial real and nonce words more rapidly than liaison-initial ones. These results suggest that native and non-native listeners used different parsing procedures for recognizing liaison-initial words in the task, with the non-native listeners’ ability to segment liaison-initial words being phonologically abstract rather than lexical.

Keywords

L2 speech segmentationL2 word recognitionliaisonFrencheye-tracking

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 257 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

This research was supported by the University of Illinois Research Board. I am very grateful to Vanessa Bordo, Chris Carignan, Juliette Dade and Éléonore LeCorvaisier for their assistance with this project, and to Sarah Brown-Schmidt, Jean-Pierre Chevrot, Caitlin Coughlin, Anne Cutler, Gary Dell, Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Cindy Fisher, Scott Frauendorf, Susan Garnsey, Meryl Garrison, Peter Golato, Angie Isaacs, Scott Jackson, Tuan Lam, Eun-Kyung Lee, Nathan Owens, Elsa Spinelli, Alison Trude, Duane Watson and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. Of course, I am solely responsible for any errors or misunderstandings in this article.

References

Ågren, J. (1973). Remarque sur quelques liaisons facultatives dans le français de conversation radiophonique. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Google Scholar
Altenberg, E. P. (2005). The perception of word boundaries in a second language. Second Language Research, 21, 325–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bachman, L. F. (1985). Performance on cloze tests with fixed-ratio and rational deletions. TESOL Quarterly, 16, 61–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boë, L.-J., & Tubach, J.-P. (1992). De A à Zut: dictionnaire phonétique du français parlé. Grenoble: Ellug.Google Scholar
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2007). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 4.5.18) [Computer program]. Retrieved 30 March 2007, from www.praat.org/.Google Scholar
Booij, G. E., & De Jong, D. (1987). The domain of liaison: Theories and data. Journal of Linguistics, 25, 1005–1025.Google Scholar
Bradlow, A. R., & Pisoni, D. B. (1999). Recognition of spoken words by native and non-native listeners: Talker-, listener-, and item-related factors. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 2074–2085.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carroll, S. E. (2001). Input and evidence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Content, A., Kearns, R. K., & Frauenfelder, U. H. (2001). Boundaries versus onsets in syllabic segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 177–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A. (2000/2001). Listening to a second language through the ears of a first. Interpreting, 5, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, J., & Segui, J. (1992). The monolingual nature of speech segmentation by bilinguals. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 381–410.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cutler, A., & Norris, J. (1988). The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 14, 113–121.Google Scholar
Dejean de la Bâtie, B. (1993). Word boundary ambiguity in spoken French. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Monash University (Australia).Google Scholar
Dejean de la Bâtie, B., & Bradley, D. C. (1995). Resolving word boundaries in spoken French: Native and non-native strategies. Applied Psycholinguistics, 16, 59–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Jong, D. (1994). La sociophonologie de la liaison orléanaise. In Lyche, C. (ed.), French generative phonology: Retrospectives and perspectives, pp. 95–130. Salford: Association for French Language Studies/European Studies Research Institute.Google Scholar
Delattre, P. (1966). Studies in French and comparative phonetics. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dumay, N., Frauenfelder, U. H., & Content, A. (2002). The role of the syllable in lexical segmentation in French: Word-spotting data. Brain and Language, 81, 144–161.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Durand, J. & Lyche, C. (2008). French liaison in the light of corpus data. French Language Studies, 18, 33–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Encrevé, P. (1988). La liaison avec et sans enchaînement. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
Féry, C. (2003). Liaison and syllable structure in French. Unpublished ms, Universität Postdam.Google Scholar
Fotos, S. (1991). The cloze test as an integrative measure of EFL proficiency: A substitute for essays on college entrance examinations? Language Learning, 41, 313–336.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaskell, M. G., Spinelli, E., & Meunier, F. (2002). Perception of resyllabification in French. Memory & Cognition, 30, 798–810.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Golato, P. (2002). Word parsing by late-learning French–English bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23, 417–446.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldinger, S. D. (1998). Echoes of echoes? An episodic theory of lexical access. Psychological Review, 105, 251–279.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huettig, F., & McQueen, J. M. (2007). The tug of war between phonological, semantic and shape information in language-mediated visual search. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 460–482.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, K. (1997). Speech perception without speaker normalization: An exemplar model. In Johnson, K. & Mullennix, J. W. (eds.), Talker variability in speech processing, pp. 145–165. San Diego, CA: Academic.Google Scholar
Laks, B. (2005). La liaison et l'illusion. Langages, 158, 101–125.Google Scholar
Lardiere, D. (2006). Ultimate attainment in second language acquisition: A case study. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Malécot, A. (1975). French liaison as a function of grammatical, phonetic, and paralinguistic variables. Phonetica, 32, 161–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mattys, S., White, L., & Melhorn, J. F. (2005). Integration of multiple speech segmentation cues: A hierarchical framework. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 134, 477–500.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McQueen, J. M. (1998). Segmentation of continuous speech using phonotactics. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 21–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McQueen, J. M., Cutler, A., & Norris, D. (2006). Phonological abstraction in the mental lexicon. Cognitive Science, 30, 1113–1126.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McQueen, J. M., & Viebahn, M. C. (2007). Tracking recognition of spoken words by tracking looks to printed words. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 661–671.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morin, Y.-C., & Kaye, J. D. (1982). The syntactic bases for French liaison. Journal of Linguistics, 18, 291–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
New, B., Pallier, C., Ferrand, L., & Mattos, R. (2001). Une base de données lexicales du français contemporain sur internet: LEXIQUE. L'Année Psychologique, 101, 447–462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nguyen, N., Wauquier-Gravelines, S., Lancia, L., & Tuller, B. (2007). Detection of liaison consonants in speech processing in French: Experimental data and theoretical implications. In Prieto, P., Mascaró, J. & Solé, M.-J. (eds.), Segmental and prosodic issues in Romance phonology, pp. 3–23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norris, J., McQueen, J., Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1997). The Possible-Word Constraint in the Segmentation of continuous speech. Cognitive Psychology, 34, 191–243.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shoemaker, E. (2009). Acoustic cues to speech segmentation in spoken French: Native and non-native strategies. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Shoemaker, E., & Birdsong, D. (2008). La resolution de la liaison en français par des locuteurs natifs et non-natifs. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Étrangère, 27, 43–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spinelli, E., McQueen, J., & Cutler, A. (2003). Processing resyllabified words in French. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 233–254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stridfeldt, M. (2003). French liaison and segmentation of non-words by Swedish learners of French. PHONUM, 9, 169–172.Google Scholar
Tranel, B. (1987). The sounds of French: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tremblay, A. (to appear). Proficiency assessment in second language acquisition research: “Clozing” the gap. Studies in Second Language Acquisition.Google Scholar
Tremblay, A., & Garrison, M. D. (2010). Cloze tests: A tool for proficiency assessment in research on L2 French. In Prior, M., Watanabe, Y., & Lee, S.-K. (eds.), Selected proceedings of the 2008 Second Language Research Forum, pp. 73–88. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Trofimovich, P. (2005). Spoken-word processing in native and second languages: An investigation of auditory word priming. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26, 479–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turk, A., Nakai, S., & Sugahara, M. (2006). Acoustic segment durations in prosodic research: A practical guide. In Sudhoff, S., Lenertóva, D., Meyer, R., Pappert, S., Augurzky, P., Mleinek, I., Richter, N. & Schließer, J. (eds.), Methods in empirical prosody research, pp. 1–28. New York: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
VanPatten, B. (1996). Input processing and grammar instruction: Theory and research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Wauquier-Gravelines, S. (1996). Organisation phonologique et traitement de la parole continue. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Université Paris 7.Google Scholar