The perception of the French /s/-/S/ contrast in early Creole-French bilinguals

Sophie Dufour (1) , Sibylle Kriegel (1) , Muhsina Alleesaib (2) , Noël Nguyen (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage
2 SFL - Structures Formelles du Langage

the two consonants are categorized can be manipulated by introducing subtle changes in the information these participants were given about the identity of the speaker that produced the stimuli. Our results are in accordance with recent studies showing native-like performance in bilinguals on a categorization task and, importantly, extend these findings to speakers of a Creole language. In addition, these results show that speech sound categorization can be influenced by information about the speaker's social identity and thus argue for models that postulate rich speech sound representations.

Keywords: Mauritian creole; social characteristics; exemplar models; speech perception; bilingualism

Domains: Cognitive science; Psychology

Sophie Dufour, Sibylle Kriegel, Muhsina Alleesaib, Noël Nguyen. The perception of the French /s/-/S/ contrast in early Creole-French bilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology, 2014, 5 (1200), ⟨10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01200⟩. ⟨hal-01244335⟩