An intonational cue to word segmentation in phonemically identical sequences

We investigated the use of language-specific intonational cues to word segmentation in French. Participants listened to phonemically identical sequences such as /selafi/, C'est la fiche/l'affiche "It's the sheet/poster." We modified the f0 of the first vowel /a/ of the natural consonant-initial production la fiche, so that it was equal to that of the natural vowel-initial production l'affiche (resynth-consonant-equal condition), higher (resynth-consonant-higher condition), or lower (resynth-consonant-lower condition). In a two-alternative forced choice task (Experiment 1), increasing the f0 in the /a/ of la fiche increased the percentage of vowel-initial (affiche) responses. In Experiment 2, participants made visual lexical decisions to vowel-initial targets (affiche) following both the natural consonant-initial production (la fiche) and the resynth-consonant-equal version. Facilitation was found only for the resynth-consonant-equal condition, suggesting that raising the f0 allowed online activation of vowel-initial targets. The recognition system seems to exploit intonational information to guide segmentation toward the beginning of content words.