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FRENCH LIAISON: LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON SPEECH PERCEPTION

Dautricourt, Robin Guillaume
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1269540566

Abstract Details

2010, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Linguistics.
French liaison is a phonological process that takes place when an otherwise silent word-final consonant is pronounced before a following vowel-initial word. It is a process that has been evolving for centuries, and whose patterns of realization are influenced by a wide range of interacting linguistic and social factors. French speakers therefore not only have to adapt their lexical identification processes to words ending in liaison consonants, but they also have to learn the rules which govern when they could pronounce the liaison consonants, and when they should expect them to be pronounced by other speakers. This dissertation begins by establishing a comprehensive understanding of liaison production with a focus on the linguistic and social factors that influence its present day usage. The challenges which liaison presents to theories of word segmentation and speech perception are then established, followed by the presentation of a series of psycholinguistic experiments that manipulate some of the most salient factors that are known to influence liaison production (e.g. syntactic context, liaison consonant identity, speaker age, and speaker social class). The first experiment investigates the effects of liaison in four different environments, and not only provides evidence that liaison consonants can facilitate word recognition of the following vowel-initial word, but that this effect is more likely to take place in contexts where liaison consonants are more likely to occur in production. A series of three experiments then use auditory stimuli from a corpus of radio interviews and visual stimuli consisting of photographed individuals in order to explore the influences of age and social class on the perception of liaison. Ultimately, the hypothesis that listeners’ expectations of speakers’ social identities can influence speech perception is put to the test using a cross-modal priming paradigm.
Shari Speer (Advisor)
Mary Beckman (Committee Member)
Mark Pitt (Committee Member)
Linguistics; Psychology
liaison; word recognition; lexical access; french; linguistics; psycholinguistics; psychology; french liaison; sociolinguistics

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dautricourt, R. G. (2010). FRENCH LIAISON: LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON SPEECH PERCEPTION [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1269540566

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dautricourt, Robin. FRENCH LIAISON: LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON SPEECH PERCEPTION. 2010. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1269540566.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dautricourt, Robin. "FRENCH LIAISON: LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON SPEECH PERCEPTION." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1269540566

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.