Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates the role of low-level acoustic cues in relation to increasing number of syllables in two word recognition experiments conducted in a remote field site. Participants are bilingual speakers of French and Drehu (Oceanic), two edge-marking languages. The two languages use grammatical gender, but differ in the number of function words used for it. In two experiments, prosodic cues were manipulated at the edges of Accentual Phrases (AP) of increasing length. APs consisted of an article and a following content word. Results show that the acoustic manipulations had a greater impact on short APs with three syllables while words in APs with more syllables could be retrieved faster in French. In Drehu, results indicate that words in longer APs are recognised later. This shows that despite similarities in the intonational phonology, listeners rely on different strategies during word recognition influenced by the grammatical make up of the language.