title: Does orthographic training on a phonemic contrast absent in the listener's dialect influence word recognition?
abstract: This study examined whether the ability of southern French speakers to discriminate between standard French word forms such as /pike/ and /pikε/ can be improved by a training procedure in which participants were exposed to the orthographic representations of words forming /e/-/ε/ minimal pairs. The results of the training procedure showed that southern French speakers were able to perceive the /e/-/ε/ contrast in word final position when they associated words containing these vowels with their correct spelled form. Further, participants in a priming experiment, which was run immediately after training, no longer showed the priming effect on the trained minimal pairs that they had shown in the pre-test. However, a priming effect on the untrained minimal pairs was still observed immediately after training, showing that this training failed to transfer to untrained items. Finally, the benefits of the training procedure were no longer observed the day after training, since southern French speakers once again showed a priming effect on the trained minimal pair of words in a one day post-test. Implications of these findings for the locus of the difficulties of the southern French speakers with the word-final /e/-/ε/ contrast are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Aix-Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7309, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France.
authors.forename: Sophie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dufour
authors.affiliation: Aix-Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7309, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France.
authors.forename: Noël
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Nguyen
authors.affiliation: Aix-Marseille Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Unité Mixte de Recherche 7309, 13100 Aix-en-Provence, France.
authors.forename: Chotiga
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pattamadilok
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
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception