THE DIFFERENTIAL ROLE OF SYLLABIC STRUCTURE IN STEM COMPLETION FOR FRENCH AND ENGLISH

Four experiments were carried out to examine the role of a word's inte rnal structure (i.e. syllables) in stem completion for French and Engl ish speakers. Subjects studied a series of unrelated words, selected s o that two words shared their initial consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) segment (e.g. BALANCE-BALCON). Subjects were then presented with CV or CVC stems (e.g. BA or BAL), half of which corresponded to the studied words' initial segment, and were asked to produce the first word that came to mind. Half the subjects performed the entire task in the audi tory modality, half did so in the visual modality (Experiment 1). In b oth modalities, French subjects completed the stems more often with st udied words in which the initial syllable matched the stem structure ( e.g. BALCON for BAL) than with studied words that did not match (e.g. BALANCE for BAL). These syllabic effects were dissociable from explici t memory (Experiment 2) and appear to be language-specific, since they were obtained with French speakers but not with English speakers (Exp eriments 3 and 4). The results are highly consistent with the notion t hat implicit memory for words reflects the operations of perceptual ph onological representations which are organised differently in French a nd English.