Does French Listeners’ Ability to Use Accentual Information at the Word Level Depend on the Ear of Presentation?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Copyright © 2020 ISCA INTERSPEECH 2020 October 25–29, 2020, Shanghai, China http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2020-1263 1615 starting point of this study is a paper published by Gonzalez and McLennan in 2007 [18]. These authors have examined how surface variation in words related to talker specificities is represented and influences spoken word processing by manipulating the ear of presentation of the words in a series of long-term priming experiments. They reported an attenuation of the repetition priming effect in case of a talker change between the first and second presentation of the repeated target word when the words were presented in the left ear, and thus are, due to contralateral projections, predominantly processed by the right hemisphere. In contrast, no modulation in the magnitude of the repetition priming effect was found in case of a talker change between the first and second presentation of the repeated target word when the words were presented in the right ear and thus are predominantly processed by the left hemisphere. This differential priming effect as a function of the ear of word presentation is particularly interesting since it shows that surface information related to talker identity is processed differently by the two hemispheres. In particular, it appears that only the right hemisphere benefit from a match in talker identity between the repeated prime and target words. By contrast, for the left hemisphere, it does not matter whether talker identity matches or mismatches between the repeated prime and target words, because in both cases the input seems to be primarily mapped onto abstract representations that are devoid of the surface information associated with talker identity. On a more general way, this study suggests that variation in talker identity can affect spoken word processing even if this type of variation is not integrated into the lexical representations. In this study, we make the strong assumption that accentual variation is represented and processed as relatedtalker variation in French, and we tested it in a design similar to that of [18]. Rather than to change the identity of the talker between the first and second presentation of the repeated prime and target words, we changed the accentual patterns and the words were presented either in their accented version (/b 'do/ bandeau ‘headband’) or in their unaccented version /b do/. As in [18], the ear of presentation of words was manipulated. In both experiments, the primes were binaurally presented while the target words were presented in the left ear only in Experiment 1 and in the right ear only in Experiment 2. Similarly to what was observed by [18], an attenuation in the repetition priming effect in case of a change in the accentual pattern should only be observed in Experiment 1 when we push processing in the right hemisphere, and thus when words are presented in the left ear. 2. 1: left-ear presentation