Differential Contribution of Prosodic Cues in Native and Non-native Speech Segmentation

The present study investigates the contribution of fundamental frequency (F0) in native English and native French listeners‟ segmentation of French speech. The results of a word-monitoring task with resynthesized stimuli show that pitch accents modulated speech segmentation for both groups, but unlike native listeners, the English listeners, who were at mid and high proficiencies in French, were not able to use F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries in French. These findings are attributed to their native language, in which F0 rise is a cue to word-initial boundaries, and to the co-occurrence of F0 and duration cues in word-final syllables in French, thus preventing them from attending to F0 rise as a cue to word-final boundaries.