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To what extent do French listeners perceive word accentuation? An EEG investigation
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Poster E80 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Outhmane Rassili1, Amandine Michelas1, Sophie Dufour1; 1Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, LPL, UMR 7309, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France
It is now well established that French listeners have difficulties to detect a change in word accentuation when the accentual contrast under investigation does not exist in the native language. Nonetheless, in all the behavioral studies examining the ability of French listeners to process non-native accentual contrasts, French listeners performed rather well, above the chance level and around 85% of correct responses. In this study, we provided a more in-depth examination of the ability of French listeners to perceive word accentual information, and compared the time-course of the discrimination of native and non-native accentual contrasts. To do it, Event-Related-Potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a same-different task. They first heard four stimuli that were strictly identical in respect to both their phonemic and accentual patterns, but were produced by four different female speakers (e.g., /ʒy'ʁi/-/ʒy'ʁi/-/ʒy'ʁi/-/ʒy'ʁi/), and then heard a fifth stimulus, the target, which was always produced by a male speaker. The target was either the same as (identical condition; e.g., /ʒy'ʁi/), or different from the first four stimuli (deviant conditions). In the deviant conditions, the target stimulus differed from the first four stimuli, either in the phonemic pattern (phonemic deviant condition; e.g., / ʒy'ʁɔ̃/) or in the accentual pattern (accentual deviant condition; e.g., /ʒyʁi/ for the native contrast or /'ʒyʁi/ for the non-native contrast). We measured the precise moment at which phonemic and accentual discrimination occurs by comparing the ERPs in the standard vs. deviant conditions. ERPs results indicated that a change in word accentuation for the native contrast (e.g., /ʒy'ʁi/-/ʒyʁi/) was detected in a time-windows between 370 and 500 ms after target onset, and that this discrimination occurs in the same-time window as phoneme (e.g., /ʒy'ʁi/-/ ʒy'ʁɔ̃/) discrimination. In contrast, while behavioral performance reached 90 % of correct responses, ERPs results indicated that a change in word accentuation was never detected for the non-native accentual contrast (/ʒy'ʁi/-/'ʒyʁi/). We conclude that the good performances observed in behavioral experiments for non-native accentual contrasts are due to attentional/decisional processes linked to the discrimination tasks, and not to automatic and unconscious processes involved in word accentuation processing.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Prosody