Reaction times in three auditory priming adult experiments

Data from three experiments on the processing of vowels and consonants in listeners of English and French, that support a paper published in the Journal of Memory and Language (Delle Luche et al. 2014).

This research compared listeners of English and French as there are considerable differences in the distribution and acoustic properties of vowels and consonants between these languages, in order to track the asymmetry at different stages of language acquisition. Experiments were conducted using computer-controlled classic decision and reaction time experiments, in the visual or auditory modalities. Experiments 1 (N=44) and 3 (N=40) are in French; experiment 2 is in English (N=44).

In each trial, the participant heard two words in quick succession: a prime and a target. The prime was a non-word and the target was a related or unrelated word. Participants had to decide as fast as possible whether the second one is a real word or a made up word. The consonant and vowel overlap between the prime and the target were manipulated.

The experiments confirmed the existence of a "universal" consonant bias by showing that both English and French listeners were faster in recognising a spoken word (i.e. atom) preceded by a prime sharing its consonants rather than its vowels. In French the consonant bias is related to the phonological and lexical levels, but not the orthographic one.

<p>It has been proposed that vowels and consonants play distinct roles in language, with vowels tending to carry intonation and grammar and consonants conveying the meaning of words (Nespor et al., 2003). Whilst this distinction appears relatively clearcut in experimental behaviour with adults its developmental origin is a matter of considerable conjecture, with far reaching implications to our understanding of language acquisition.
Three main hypotheses have been suggested to account for this asymmetry. The first hypothesis posits that it is a property of the linguistic system, whilst the second indicates that the relative roles of consonants and vowels is driven by the disparities in their acoustic properties. In the final hypothesis the asymmetry arises from differences in the stochastic distribution of vowels and consonants for a particular language.

In this project we will directly compare the processing of vowels and consonants between adult, toddler, and infant listeners of English and French. As there are considerable differences in the distribution and acoustic properties of vowel and consonants between these languages we will be able to judge the relative merits of the competing hypotheses by tracking the asymmetry at different stages of language acquisition. </p>