French Speakers Prefer Prosody Over Statistics to Segment Speech.

To segment words in unfamiliar speech, listeners are known to exploit both native prosodic cues and statistical cues available in the speech signal. However, how and when these cues are combined remains a matter of debate. Here, we studied how transitional probabilities (TPs) and prosodic phrasal bo...

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Publicado en:Language & Speech Vol. 69; no. 3; pp. 708 - 726
Autores principales: Birulés, Joan, Marimon, Mireia, Duroyal, Alexandre, Vilain, Anne, Bailly, Gérard, Fort, Mathilde
Formato: research tables/charts Journal Article
Publicado: Sage Publications Inc. Sep2026
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Sep2026
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      pub: Sage Publications Inc.
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        atl: French Speakers Prefer Prosody Over Statistics to Segment Speech.
      aug:
        au:
          Birulés, Joan
          Marimon, Mireia
          Duroyal, Alexandre
          Vilain, Anne
          Bailly, Gérard
          Fort, Mathilde
        affil: Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition, UMR 5105, University Grenoble Alpes, France
      sug:
        subj:
          Speech Acoustics
          Language In Adulthood
          Phonetics
          Speech Perception
          Language Processing
          Human
          Funding Source
          Learning
          France
          Statistics
          Experimental Studies
          Auditory Perception
          Task Performance and Analysis
          Linguistics
          Randomized Controlled Trials
          Comparative Studies
          Descriptive Statistics
          ROC Curve
          Chi Square Test
          Adult
          Adult: 19-44 years
      ab: To segment words in unfamiliar speech, listeners are known to exploit both native prosodic cues and statistical cues available in the speech signal. However, how and when these cues are combined remains a matter of debate. Here, we studied how transitional probabilities (TPs) and prosodic phrasal boundaries are combined by French speakers to segment words. Since French does not have lexical stress, prosodic phrasal boundaries unambiguously signal word boundaries, providing a unique possibility to test whether prosodic cues can overcome statistical ones, and constrain further statistically based segmentation. We tested French adults in an artificial speech segmentation task, manipulating the consistency between prosodic and TP cues, signaling either the same or different word boundaries. Results showed that participants favored prosodic phrasal boundaries over TPs, regardless of exposure time to the speech stream (Experiment 1: 3.5 minutes; Experiment 2: 7 min), supporting a prosodically driven statistical segmentation of the speech stream.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        research
        tables/charts
        Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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