RESOLVING WORD BOUNDARIES IN SPOKEN FRENCH - NATIVE AND NONNATIVE STRATEGIES

The segmentation strategies used by native and non-native listeners of French were examined in two phoneme-monitoring experiments which requ ired the subjects to detect the presence of word-initial /t/ in potent ial liaison phrases (e.g., excellent tableau/excellent acteur) and in non-liaison phrases (e.g., vrai tableau/vrai acteur). The essentially faultless performance of the natives suggested that the optimal segmen tation routine in such phrases is primarily based on the identificatio n of the critical word and, to a lesser extent, on the contextual info rmation, which was more efficiently used to check the outcome of word recognition. In contrast, non-natives tended to rely on guessing strat egies, not based on contextual information (contrary to the widely hel d language teaching recommendation), but on an incomplete acoustic-pho netic/lexical analysis of the signal.