TY - JOUR A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris A1 - Viebahn, Malte Clemens A1 - Racine, Isabelle A1 - Mabut, Cassandre A1 - Spinelli, Elsa T1 - Intrinsic advantage for canonical forms in spoken word recognition BT - myth or reality? JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - In connected speech, many words are produced with a pronunciation that differs from the canonical form. How the speech recognition system deals with this variation is a fundamental issue in the language processing literature. The present study examines the roles of variant type, variant frequency, and context in the processing of French words with a canonical (schwa variant, e.g. semaine “week”) and a non-canonical pronunciation (no-schwa variant, s’maine). It asks whether the processing of canonical pronunciations is faster than the processing of non-canonical ones. Results of three lexical decision experiments reveal that more frequent variants are recognised more quickly, and that there is no advantage for canonical forms once variant frequency is accounted for. Two of these experiments further failed to find evidence that the context in which the words are presented modulate the effect of variant type. These findings are discussed in the light of spoken word recognition models. KW - Spoken word recognition KW - phonological variation KW - exposure frequency KW - French schwa KW - context Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1388412 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 33 IS - 4 SP - 494 EP - 511 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris A1 - Welby, Pauline A1 - Clement, Melanie A1 - Spinelli, Elsa T1 - Orthography and second language word learning BT - Moving beyond "friend or foe?" JF - The journal of the Acoustical Society of America N2 - French participants learned English pseudowords either with the orthographic form displayed under the corresponding picture (Audio-Ortho) or without (Audio). In a naming task, pseudowords learned in the Audio-Ortho condition were produced faster and with fewer errors, providing a first piece of evidence that orthographic information facilitates the learning and on-line retrieval of productive vocabulary in a second language. Formant analyses, however, showed that productions from the Audio-Ortho condition were more French-like (i.e., less target-like), a result confirmed by a vowel categorization task performed by native speakers of English. It is argued that novel word learning and pronunciation accuracy should be considered together. (C) 2019 Acoustical Society of America Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5094923 SN - 0001-4966 SN - 1520-8524 VL - 145 IS - 4 SP - EL265 EP - EL271 PB - American Institute of Physics CY - Melville ER -