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The processing of dialectal variants: Further insight from French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2018

SOPHIE DUFOUR ,
YU-YING CHUANG  and
NOËL NGUYEN
SOPHIE DUFOUR*
Affiliation:
Aix-Marseille Université
YU-YING CHUANG
Affiliation:
University of Tübingen
NOËL NGUYEN
Affiliation:
Aix-Marseille Université
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Sophie Dufour, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, 5 avenue Pasteur 13604 Aix-en-Provence, France. E-mail: sophie.dufour@lpl-aix.fr
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Abstract

In two semantic priming experiments, this study examined how southern French speakers process the standard French [o] variant in closed syllables in comparison to their own variant [ɔ]. In Experiment 1, southern French speakers showed facilitation in the processing of the associated target word VIOLET whether the word prime mauve was pronounced by a standard French speaker ([mov]) or a southern French speaker ([mɔv]). More importantly, Experiment 1 has also revealed that words of type mauve, which are subject to dialectal variation, behave exactly in the same way as words of type gomme, which are pronounced with [ɔ] by both southern and standard French speakers, and for which we also found no modulation in the magnitude of the priming effect as a function of the dialect of the speaker. Experiment 2 replicated the priming effect found with the standard French variant [mov], and failed to show a priming effect with nonwords such as [mœv] that also differ from the southern French variant [mɔv] by only one phonetic feature. Our study thus provides further evidence for efficient processing of dialectal variants during spoken word recognition, even if these variants are not part of the speaker’s own productions.

Keywords

dialectal variantslexical representationssemantic primingspoken word recognition
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 351 - 372
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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