The present investigation deals with regional variation and articulation rate in French. The articulation rate in read speech and in spontaneous speech was examined in seven variants of French: Paris and Lyon in France; Tournai and Liège in Belgium; Geneva, Neuchâtel and Nyon in Switzerland. Results showed that Swiss speakers articulate at a lower syllable rate than French speakers (especially Parisian speakers) and Belgian speakers, independently of the speaking style (reading or conversation). This finding confirms that articulation rate varies regionally. Moreover, results revealed that extralinguistic and linguistic factors, such as the speaker's age and gender, the speaking style, the utterance length and the articulation rate of the adjacent inter-pause chunk, also affect articulation rate. AbstractThe present investigation deals with regional variation and articulation rate in French. The articulation rate in read speech and in spontaneous speech was examined in seven variants of French: Paris and Lyon in France; Tournai and Liège in Belgium; Geneva, Neuchâtel and Nyon in Switzerland. Results showed that Swiss speakers articulate at a lower syllable rate than French speakers (especially Parisian speakers) and Belgian speakers, independently of the speaking style (reading or conversation). This finding confirms that articulation rate varies regionally. Moreover, results revealed that extra-linguistic and linguistic factors, such as the speaker's age and gender, the speaking style, the utterance length and the articulation rate of the adjacent inter-pause chunk, also affect articulation rate.

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The present research aims at determining to what extent an orthographic error related to the accent mark affects the visual recognition of Spanish words. For this, we conducted two experiments of visual lexical decision (with no word production), in which Spanish-speaking participants were instructed to ignore the presence or the absence of the accent mark.Stimuli were composed of words originally without accent mark (OrNA for 'originally no accent'; Experiment 1) and words originally with an accent mark (OrWA for 'originally with accent'; Experiments 1 and 2). OrNA words were presented in three conditions: correctly spelled (e.g., dulce 'sweet'), with an added accent mark on the lexically stressed vowel (dúlce) and with a misplaced accent mark on the lexically non-stressed vowel (dulcé). Along the same line, OrWA words were also presented in three conditions: correctly spelled (e.g., lápiz 'pen'), without the accent mark (lapiz) and with a misplaced accent mark (lapíz).Taken together, the results showed that the accent mark plays a role in the visual word recognition in Spanish. More specifically, the addition and/or the misplacement of an accent mark significantly slow down the visual recognition of the words, whereas the omission of the accent mark does not. The findings are discussed within the framework of dual-route models.Keywords: Spanish; accent mark; visual word recognition; lexical stress; lexical access. RESUMEN:Marca acentual y reconocimiento visual de palabras en español.-Esta investigación tiene como meta determinar en qué medida un error ortográfico relativo al acento gráfico (i.e., tilde) afecta al reconocimiento visual de las palabras en español. Para ello, realizamos dos experimentos de decisión léxica visual (sin producción de las palabras), en los que los participantes tenían que ignorar la presencia o ausencia del acento gráfico.Los estímulos se componían de palabras originalmente sin acento gráfico (OrNA para 'originally no accent'; Experimento 1) y palabras originalmente con acento gráfico (OrWA para 'originally with accent'; Experimentos 1 y 2). Las palabras OrNA se presentaron en tres condiciones: correctamente ortografiadas (p. ej., dulce), con un acento gráfico en la vocal tónica (dúlce) y con un acento mal colocado en la vocal átona (dulcé). Asimismo, las palabras OrWA también se presentaron en tres condiciones: correctamente ortografiadas (p. ej., lápiz), sin el acento gráfico (lapiz) y con el acento gráfico mal colocado (lapíz).Los resultados mostraron que el acento gráfico desempeña un papel en el reconocimiento visual de las palabras. Más específicamente, la adición y/o la mala colocación del acento gráfico ralentizan significativamente el reconocimiento visual de las palabras, mientras que la omisión del acento gráfico no lo dificulta. Discutimos los resultados dentro del marco de los modelos de doble ruta.Palabras clave: español; acento gráfico; reconocimiento visual; acento léxico; acceso al léxico.

The perception of stress is highly influenced by listeners' native language. In this research, the authors examined the effect of intonation and talker variability (here: phonetic variability) in the discrimination of Spanish lexical stress contrasts by native Spanish (N = 17), German (N = 21), and French (N = 27) listeners. Participants listened to 216 trials containing three Spanish disyllabic words, where one word carried a different lexical stress to the others. The listeners' task was to identify the deviant word in each trial (Odd-One-Out task). The words in the trials were produced by either the same talker or by two different talkers, and carried the same or varying intonation patterns. The German listeners' performance was lower compared to the Spanish listeners but higher than that of the French listeners. French listeners performed above chance level with and without talker variability, and performed at chance level when intonation variability was introduced. Results are discussed in the context of the stress "deafness" hypothesis.

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