title: How deaf are French speakers to stress?
abstract: This event-related potential study examined whether French listeners use stress at a phonological level when discriminating between stressed and unstressed words in their language. Participants heard five words and made same/different decisions about the final word (male voice) with respect to the four preceding words (different female voices). Compared to the first four context words, the target word was (i) phonemically and prosodically identical (/ʃu/-/ʃu/; control condition), (ii) phonemically identical but differing in the presence of a primary stress (/ʃu'/-/ʃu/), (iii) prosodically identical but phonemically different (/ʃo/-/ʃu/), or (iv) both phonemically and prosodically different (/ʃo'/-/ʃu/). Crucially, differences on the P200 and the following N200 components were observed for the /ʃu'/-/ʃu/ and the /ʃo/-/ʃu/ conditions compared to the /ʃu/-/ʃu/ control condition. Moreover, on the N200 component more negativity was observed for the /ʃo/-/ʃu/ condition compared to the /ʃu'/-/ʃu/ conditions, while no difference emerged between these two conditions on the earlier P200 component. Crucially, the results suggest that French listeners are capable of creating an abstract representation of stress. However, as they receive more input, participants react more strongly to phonemic than to stress information.
authors.affiliation: Aix Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7309, 5 Avenue Pasteur, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France.
authors.forename: Amandine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Michelas
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique Expérimentale, Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Éducation, Université de Genève, Boulevard du Pont d'Arve 40, 1204 Genève, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Ulrich Hans
authors.initials: UH
authors.lastname: Frauenfelder
authors.affiliation: Aix-Marseille Université, Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes, 27 Boulevard Jean Moulin, 13005 Marseille, France.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Schön
authors.affiliation: Aix Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7309, 5 Avenue Pasteur, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France.
authors.forename: Sophie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dufour
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult