Gallot, S. , Bagou, O. & Frauenfelder, U.
Laboratoire de Psycholinguistique Expérimentale, FPSE,University of Geneva
In adult word recognition, lexical segmentation is guided principally by lexical knowledge, with sublexical cues playing a lesser role. In word learning, however, the relative contribution of these two information sources is reversed since lexical knowledge is initially absent and only increases gradually over time. Sublexical cues are thus crucial for segmentation, particularly at learning onset. This study tracks how four types of sublexical segmentation cues contribute over time to the progressive construction of novel words. Participants were exposed to one of 8 different artificial language (ALs) constructed by concatenating 8 statistically defined artificial words (AWs). These ALs were constructed by manipulating the presence of transitional probabilities (TPs) between syllables, prosodic, phonotactic and coarticulation segmentation cues. During exposition, participants had to detect target phonemes located either internally or finally in AWs that either occurred frequently (64 times) or rarely (8 times). Results revealed that final phonemes were detected faster in frequent than in rare AWs, while no effect of word frequency was found for internal phonemes. This interaction between phoneme position and word frequency reflects lexical activation which emerged after different amounts of exposure depending on the types of sublexical cues that were present in the language tested.