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Published on: December 18, 2015
Effects of somatosensory perturbation on the perception of French /u/
Lucie Ménard1, Lambert Beaudry1, Pascal Perrier2
1Laboratoire de Phonétique, Université du Québec à Montréal, Center for Research on Brain, Language, and Music, CP. 8888, succ. Centre-Ville, Montreal, Québec H3C 3P8, Canada.
Abstract:
In a study of whether somatosensory feedback related to articulatory configuration is involved in speech perception, 30 French-speaking adults performed a speech discrimination task in which vowel pairs along the French /u/ (rounded vowel requiring a small lip area) to /œ/ (rounded vowel associated with larger lip area) continuum were used as stimuli. Listeners had to perform the test in two conditions: with a 2-cm-diameter lip-tube in place (mimicking /œ/) and without the lip-tube (neutral lip position). Results show that, in the lip-tube condition, listeners perceived more stimuli as /œ/, in line with the proposal that an auditory-somatosensory interaction exists.
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