Fourtassi, A. 1, 2 & Dupoux, E. 2, 3
1 Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique
2 Ecole Normale Supérieure
3 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
During the course of language acquisition, children face the challenge of deciding if a sound contrast is contrastive (phonemic) or non-contrastive (allophonic). Previous research has outlined the role of bottom-up and lexical cues. Here, we investigate whether even higher level information (conceptual knowledge) modulates the phonemic status of a phonetic contrast.
We tested this hypothesis with adults in a web-based experiment. Participants were trained to learn the pairing between a minimal pair in an artificial language and two objects. They were split into 3 groups. In one group the two objects were different tokens of the same category (cow), in the second group the objects belonged to two similar categories (cow/deer) and the final group involved objects from distant categories (cow/car). After the training, participants were tested in a same-different task. The target was a new minimal pair that varies along the same sound contrast as the minimal pair used in the training phase. The results confirmed the predictions: participants in the semantically distant categories were more likely to choose the phonemic interpretation, whereas participants in the same category were more likely to choose the allophonic interpretation. Participants in the semantically ambiguous category were basically at chance level.