Do different boundary types induce subtle acoustic cues to which French listeners are sensitive?

This paper examines the production of perception of three types of phonological boundaries. In the first part, we extended our previous acoustic analysis to confirm that French speakers mark word and syllables boundaries differently in enchainement sequences. The durational properties of vowels and consonants were compared in 3 boundary conditions: (A) enchainement (V1C#V2), (B) word- initial consonant (V1#CV2), (C) syllable onset consonant (V1.CV2). Results showed that the three boundary conditions are varying in subtle durational differences on V1 and C. In the second part, the sensitivity of French listeners to these acoustic cues was evaluated. Preliminary results showed that participants are sensitive to durational differences, at least for discriminating between syllable and word boundaries. Implications of these results for lexical segmentation are discussed.