Sonority as a Phonological Cue in Early Perception of Written Syllables in French.

Méghane Tossonian,Ludovic Ferrand,Ophélie Lucas,Mickaël Berthon,Norbert Maïonchi-Pino

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.558443

Abstract

Many studies focused on the letter and sound co-occurrences to account for the well-documented syllable-based effects in French in visual (pseudo)word processing. Although these language-specific statistical properties are crucial, recent data suggest that studies that go all-in on phonological and orthographic regularities may be misguided in interpreting how—and why—readers locate syllable boundaries and segment clusters. Indeed, syllable-based effects could depend on more abstract, universal phonological constraints that rule and govern how letter and sound occur and co-occur, and readers could be sensitive to sonority—a universal phonological element—for processing (pseudo)words. Here, we investigate whether French adult skilled readers rely on universal phonological sonority-related markedness continuum across the syllable boundaries for segmentation (e.g., from marked, illegal intervocalic clusters /zl/ to unmarked, legal intervocalic clusters /lz/). To address this question, we ran two tasks with 128 French adult skilled readers using two versions of the illusory conjunction paradigm (Task 1 without white noise; Task 2 with white noise). Our results show that syllable location and segmentation in reading is early and automatically modulated by phonological sonority-related markedness in the absence or quasi-absence of statistical information and does not require acoustic-phonetic information. We discuss our results toward the overlooked role of phonological universals and the over-trusted role of statistical information during reading processes.

Highlights

In syllable-timed languages such as French, there is robust evidence that supports the syllable as a perceptual and functional unit that early and automatically mediates the access to the lexicon and drives the segmentation strategies in the first steps of visualword processing in adults (e.g., Ferrand et al, 1996; Mathey and Zagar, 2002; Doignon and Zagar, 2005; Mathey et al, 2013)
PARTICIPANTS and ITEMS were considered as random factors, whereas CONDITION, TARGETLETTER POSITION, SONORITY PROFILE, and CONTEXT were entered as fixed factors
Because we were interested in early, quick responses, we applied a restrictive procedure for data inclusion

Summary

Introduction

In syllable-timed languages such as French, there is robust evidence that supports the syllable as a perceptual and functional unit that early and automatically mediates the access to the lexicon and drives the segmentation strategies in the first steps of visual (pseudo)word processing in adults (e.g., Ferrand et al, 1996; Mathey and Zagar, 2002; Doignon and Zagar, 2005; Mathey et al, 2013). Sonority in Perception of Written Syllables within and across syllables to account for these syllable effects (e.g., initial syllable frequency, etc.; e.g., Colé et al, 1999; Goslin et al, 2006; Chetail and Mathey, 2009a,b; Doignon-Camus et al., 2009a; Maïonchi-Pino et al, 2010; Chetail et al, 2012; Mahé et al., 2014; Chetail, 2015). This a priori focus on an “all is a matter of statistical properties” could not be the sole and unique approach to account for these syllable-based effects. The clincher of the bigram trough hypothesis to account for mapping letter clusters that frequently co-occur onto syllables and define perceptual syllable boundaries

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion