This paper examines the production of perception of three types of phonological boundaries. In the first part, we extended our previous acoustic analysis to confirm that French speakers mark word and syllables boundaries differently in enchaînement sequences. The durational properties of vowels and consonants were compared in 3 boundary conditions: (A) enchaînement (V1CV2), (B) word-initial consonant (V1CV2), (C) syllable onset consonant (V1.CV2). Results showed that the three boundary conditions are varying in subtle durational differences on V1 and C. In the second part, the sensitivity of French listeners to these acoustic cues was evaluated. Preliminary results showed that participants are sensitive to durational differences, at least for discriminating between syllable and word boundaries. Implications of these results for lexical segmentation are discussed.

The processes through which readers evoke mental representations of phonological forms from print constitute a hotly debated and controversial issue in current psycholinguistics. In this paper we present a computational analysis of the grapho-phonological system of written French, and an empirical validation of some of the obtained descriptive statistics. The results provide direct evidence demonstrating that both grapheme frequency and grapheme entropy influence performance on pseudoword naming. We discuss the implications of those findings for current models of phonological coding in visual word recognition.

The claim that the syllable constitutes a basic perceptual unit in French is commonly accepted. It is based in part on the syllable effect [1] obtained with words. The present study extends these syllable detection experiments to pseudowords. Four experiments failed to replicate the syllable effect observed on words. Detection responses in pseudowords are made as soon as sufficient information becomes available in the signal. The different pattern of results obtained with words and pseudowords suggests that the syllable effect is post- lexical rather than pre-lexical.