Segments as carriers of prosodic information in word onsets

Research has shown that listeners exploit prosodic cues to carry out word segmentation, and that the choice of cues and how these are weighted are language specific. French accentual phrases are demarcated to the left edge with a phrase initial ris-ing (LHi) accent. Listeners are sensitive to the start of the rise (from L to Hi) which is used for word segmentation and to disambiguate between segmentally identical pairs. However, it is unclear whether prosodic cues are only used when disambigua-tion is required or if they play a more general role. Addition-ally, it remains an open question as to how sensitive listeners are to prosodic information of the initial rise encoded at the segmental level. This study examines whether microprosodic variations influence word recognition in less well studied segmental environments such as consonant clusters. A manipulation of duration and fundamental frequency cues at the word onset was performed. Results show that lexical activation was significantly delayed for words with onsets containing voiced consonant clusters of the type /bl/. Lexical access was also delayed for onsets of the type /pl/, although the effect was weaker. These results provide preliminary evidence that French listeners are sensitive to fine-grained prosodic information on segments.