Are Prosodic Variants Stored in the French Mental Lexicon?

Abstract

Abstract. A long-term priming experiment examined the way stress information is processed and represented in French speakers’ mind. Repeated prime and target words either matched (/bãˈ do/ – /bãˈ do/ “headband”) or mismatched their stress pattern (/bãdo/ – /bãˈ do/). In comparison to a control condition (/maʁ[Formula: see text]/ – /bãˈ do/), the results showed that matching and mismatching primes were equally effective in facilitating the processing of the target words. Thus, despite the fact that French speakers routinely produce and hear words in their stressed and unstressed versions, this study suggests that stress in French is not integrated into lexical representations.