Asymmetries in the processing of French high - and low - mid vowels : [ ATR ] or

An ongoing issue in phonology is how highand low-mid vowels are represented in the mental lexicon. The current study is the first to neurophsyiologically investigate whether the privative feature [ATR] or the privative feature [RTR] should be used to distinguish the French front unrounded high-mid vowel [e] and the front unrounded low-mid vowel [ɛ], that is, which feature is the dominant value in French. We use event-related brain potentials in a mismatch negativity (MMN) study, since MMN has been shown to be sensitive to languagespecific phoneme representations. It was found that a change from [ɛ] to [e] elicited bigger MMN than the reverse change, indicating that [ɛ] is represented in the lexicon as [RTR], whereas [e] is left lexically unspecified. Because the standard low-mid vowel [ɛ] generates a strong prediction regarding its tongue root feature [RTR], which is not matched by the tongue root feature of the deviant [e], stronger MMN elicited in this condition than in the reverse case. This is in line with Casali’s assumption that [RTR] is specified in languages with one series of high vowels, as is the case in French, whereas [ATR] is unspecified.