Tue-1-4-5 Does French listeners’ ability to use accentual information at the word level depend on the ear of presentation?

Abstract: In two long-term repetition priming experiments, we investigated how accentual information is processed and represented in the French listeners’ mind. Repeated prime and target words either matched (/bɑ̃'do/ - / bɑ̃'do/ ‘headband’) or mismatched in their accentual patterns (/bɑ̃do/ - /bɑ̃'do/). In experiment 1, the target words were presented in the left ear only, and attenuation in the repetition priming effect was observed when the primes and the targets mismatched in their accentual pattern. The differential priming effect between match and mismatch primes was no longer observed in Experiment 2 when the targets were presented in the right ear only. Together, these results showed that accentual variation at the word level in French is treated as related-talker variation, and only influences word recognition under specific circumstances, in particular, when we push word processing in the right hemisphere.