A DESTRESSING DEAFNESS IN FRENCH

Spanish but not French uses accent to distinguish between words (e.g., topo vs topo). Two populations of subjects were tested on the same ma terials to determine whether this difference has an impact on the perc eptual capacities of listeners. In Experiment 1, using an ABX paradigm , we found that French subjects had significantly more difficulties th an Spanish subjects in performing an ABX classification task based on accent. In Experiment 2, we found that Spanish subjects were unable to ignore irrelevant differences in accent in a phoneme-based ABX tack, whereas French subjects had no difficulty at all. In Experiment 3, we replicated the basic French finding and found that Spanish subjects be nefited from redundant accent information even when phonemic informati on alone was sufficient to perform the task. In our final experiment, we showed that French subjects can be made to respond to the acoustic correlates of accent; therefore their difficulty in Experiment 1 seems to be located at the level of short-term memory. The implications of these findings for language-specific processing and acquisition are di scussed. (C) 1997 Academic Press.