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Comparing French syllabification in preliterate children and adults

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2007

JEREMY GOSLIN  and
CAROLINE FLOCCIA
JEREMY GOSLIN
Affiliation:
University of Plymouth, UK
CAROLINE FLOCCIA
Affiliation:
University of Plymouth, UK, University of Franche-Comté, France, and University of Provence, France
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Abstract

The influence of development and literacy upon syllabification in French was evaluated by comparing the segmental behavior of 4- to 5-year-old preliterate children and adults using a pause insertion task. Participants were required to repeat bisyllabic words such as “fourmi” (ant) by inserting a pause between its two syllabic components (/fur/-/mi/). In the first experiment we tested segmentation over a range of 49 double intervocalic consonant clusters. A similar general segmentation behavior was observed in both age groups, with a pattern that fit the predictions from a legality principle-based model of syllabification. Experiment 2 revealed that opacity between phonological and orthographic representations lead to increased ambisyllabic responses and a reduction in segmentation consistency in adults. In total, these findings indicate that syllabic forms are consistently represented from an early age, but that segmentation in metalinguistic tasks is susceptible to contamination from spelling and etymological knowledge.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 341 - 367
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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