Sharon Peperkamp
Biographic Data
| ID | 172916 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sharon Peperkamp |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sharon |
| FAMILY NAME | Peperkamp |
| SIGNATURE | PEPERKAMP S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5985-8878 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 88 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Influence of Grammatical Gender on Object Conceptualization Is Weak and Language‐Dependent
Do we make gendered associations with objects whose linguistic labels have masculine/feminine grammatical gender? This question derives from the neo‐Whorfian view that language shapes our conceptualizations of the world. Previous research has provided mixed answers. Here, we present three experiments where we tested for the gender effect on object conceptualization using a word association approach: a first group of participants generated adjecti…
Grammatical Gender Does Not Influence How We Conceive of Objects
Sign recognition
We investigate the degree to which mispronounced signs can be accommodated by signers of French Sign Language (LSF). Using an offline judgment task, we examine both the individual contributions of three parameters - handshape, movement, and location - to sign recognition, and the impact of the individual features that were manipulated to obtain the mispronounced signs. Results indicate that signers judge mispronounced handshapes to be less damagi…
Rhythm Is a Marker of Ethnicity in Modern Hebrew
In Modern Hebrew, only three segmental markers are typically acknowledged as ethnically conditioned, and usage of these markers has significantly decreased in second and third generation speakers. Yet the sociolinguistic situation of diverging language backgrounds of first generation speakers, compounded with ethnic segregation in housing and the workforce, seems like a fertile ground for social identification from speech. We report two studies o…
How Fair is Gender-Fair Language? Insights from Gender Ratio Estimations in French
Heated societal debates in various countries concern the use of gender-fair language, meant to replace the generic use of grammatically masculine forms. Advocates and opponents of gender-fair language disagree on – among other things – the question of whether masculine forms leave women underrepresented in people's minds. We investigated the influence of linguistic form on the mental representations of gender in French. Participants read a short …
Using allophonic variation in L2 word recognition
During spoken word processing, native (L1) listeners use allophonic variation to predictively rule out word competitors and speed up word recognition. There is some evidence that second language (L2) learners develop an awareness of allophonic distributions in their L2, but whether they use their knowledge to facilitate word recognition online, like native listeners do, is largely unknown. In an offline gating experiment and an online eye-trackin…
Marginal contrast in loanword phonology
Though Dutch is usually described as lacking a voicing contrast at the velar place of articulation, due to intense language contact and heavy lexical borrowing, a contrast between /k/ and /g/ has recently been emerging. We explored the status of this contrast in Dutch speakers in both production and perception. We asked participants to produce loanwords containing a /g/ in the source language (e.g., goal) and found a range of productions, includi…
A meta‐analysis of infants’ word‐form recognition
Recognizing word forms is an important step on infants’ way toward mastering their native language. The present study takes a meta‐analytic approach to assess overarching questions on the literature of early word‐form recognition. Specifically, we investigated the extent to which there is cross‐linguistic evidence for an early recognition lexicon, and how it may be influenced by infant age, language background, and familiarity of the selected sti…
On the relationship between perception and production of L2 sounds
Previous studies have yielded contradictory results on the relationship between perception and production in second language (L2) phonological processing. We re-examine the relationship between the two modalities both within and across processing levels, addressing several issues regarding methodology and statistical analyses. We focus on the perception and production of the French contrast /u/–/y/ by proficient English-speaking late learners of …
Competition between whole-word and decomposed representations of English prefixed words
Compensation for Phonological Assimilation in Bilingual Children
We investigate bilingual children’s perception of assimilations, i.e. phonological rules by which a consonant at a word edge adopts a phonological feature of a neighboring consonant. For instance, English has place assimilation (e.g., green is pronounced with a final [m] in green pen), while French has voicing assimilation (e.g., sac is pronounced with a final [g] in sac vert “green bag”). Previous research has shown that French and English monol…
A meta-analysis of infants' word-form recognition
Recognizing word forms is an important step on infants’ way towards mastering their native language. The present study takes a meta-analytic approach to assess overarching questions on the literature of early word-form recognition. Specifically, we investigated the extent to which there is cross-linguistic evidence for an early recognition lexicon, and how it may be influenced by infant age, language background, and familiarity of the selected st…
Phonetically natural rules benefit from a learning bias
Substance-based phonological theories predict that a preference for phonetically natural rules (those which reflect constraints on speech production and perception) is encoded in synchronic grammars, and translates into learning biases. Some previous work has shown evidence for such biases, but methodological concerns with these studies mean that the question warrants further investigation. We revisit this issue by focusing on the learning of pal…
High-Variability Phonetic Training enhances second language lexical processing
High-Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) has been shown to be effective in improving the perception of the hardest non-native sounds. However, it remains unclear whether such training can enhance phonological processing at the lexical level. The present study tested whether HVPT also improves word recognition. Late French learners of English completed eight online sessions of HVPT on the perception of English word-initial /h/. This sound does no…
Dual language input and the impact of language separation on early lexical development
We examined properties of the input and the environment that characterize bilingual exposure in 11‐month‐old infants with a regular exposure to French and an additional language, and their possible effects on receptive vocabulary size. Using a diary method, we found that a majority of the families roughly followed a one‐parent–one‐language approach. Yet, the two languages co‐occurred to various extents within the same half‐hour both within and ac…
The asymmetric contribution of consonants and vowels to phonological similarity
Lexical priming is known to arise from phonological similarity between prime and target, and this phenomenon is an important component of our understanding of the processes of lexical access and competition. However, the precise nature of the role of phonological similarity in lexical priming is understudied. In the present study, two experiments were conducted in which participants performed auditory lexical decision on CVC targets which were pr…
Assessing the distinctiveness of phonological features in word recognition
Relative Difficulty of Understanding Foreign Accents as a Marker of Proficiency
Foreign-accented speech is generally harder to understand than native-accented speech. This difficulty is reduced for non-native listeners who share their first language with the non-native speaker. It is currently unclear, however, how non-native listeners deal with foreign-accented speech produced by speakers of a different language. We show that the process of (second) language acquisition is associated with an increase in the relative difficu…
Phonology versus phonetics in loanword adaptations
The question of whether loanword adaptation is based on phonological or phonetic proximity has been widely debated. Focusing on the adaptation of English vowels in French, I argue that on-line adaptations are based on perceived phonetic proximity, which is influenced by co-articulatory information. A perception experiment assessed French listeners’ perception of English vowels presented both within and spliced out of CVC syllables; the results we…
Complex linguistic rules modulate early auditory brain responses
Consonants are More Important than Vowels in the Bouba-kiki Effect
Adult listeners systematically associate certain speech sounds with round or spiky shapes, a sound-symbolic phenomenon known as the “bouba-kiki effect.” In this study, we investigate the respective influences of consonants and vowels in this phenomenon. French participants were asked to match auditorily presented pseudowords with one of two visually presented shapes, one round and one spiky. The pseudowords were created by crossing either two con…
An experimental study of the role of social factors in language change
There is great variation in whether foreign sounds in loanwords are adapted or retained. Importantly, the retention of foreign sounds can lead to a sound change in the language. We propose that social factors influence the likelihood of loanword sound adaptation, and use this case to introduce a novel experimental paradigm for studying language change that captures the role of social factors. Specifically, we show that the relative prestige of th…
The influence of inhibitory skill on phonological representations in production and perception☆
The effect of domain prestige and interlocutors' bilingualism on loanword adaptations
There is great variability in whether foreign sounds in loanwords are adapted, such that segments show cross-word and cross-situational variation in adaptation. Previous research proposed that word frequency, speakers' level of bilingualism and neighborhoods' level of bilingualism can explain such variability. We test for the effect of these factors and propose two additional factors: interlocutors' level of bilingualism and the prestige of the d…
Similarity in the generalization of implicitly learned sound patterns
It is likely that generalization of implicitly learned sound patterns to novel words and sounds is structured by a similarity metric, but how may this metric best be captured? We report on an experiment where participants were exposed to an artificial phonology, and frequency ratings were used to probe implicit abstraction of onset statistics. Non-words bearing an onset that was presented during initial exposure were subsequently rated most frequ…
The influence of orthography on loanword adaptations
Low inhibitory skill leads to non-native perception and production in bilinguals' native language
Perception of predictable stress
Discovering words in the continuous speech stream
On the relationship between perception and production of L2 sounds
Previous studies have yielded contradictory results on the relationship between perception and production in second language (L2) phonological processing. We re-examine the relationship between the two modalities both within and across processing levels, addressing several issues regarding methodology and statistical analyses. We focus on the perception and production of the French contrast /u/–/y/ by proficient English-speaking late learners of …
The influence of inhibitory skill on phonological representations in production and perception☆
Consonants are More Important than Vowels in the Bouba-kiki Effect
Adult listeners systematically associate certain speech sounds with round or spiky shapes, a sound-symbolic phenomenon known as the “bouba-kiki effect.” In this study, we investigate the respective influences of consonants and vowels in this phenomenon. French participants were asked to match auditorily presented pseudowords with one of two visually presented shapes, one round and one spiky. The pseudowords were created by crossing either two con…
Competition between whole-word and decomposed representations of English prefixed words
The effect of domain prestige and interlocutors' bilingualism on loanword adaptations
There is great variability in whether foreign sounds in loanwords are adapted, such that segments show cross-word and cross-situational variation in adaptation. Previous research proposed that word frequency, speakers' level of bilingualism and neighborhoods' level of bilingualism can explain such variability. We test for the effect of these factors and propose two additional factors: interlocutors' level of bilingualism and the prestige of the d…
Lexical Exceptions in Stress Systems
Some, but not all, languages with fixed stress exhibit lexical exceptions to their stress rule. Under the assumption that lexical exceptions can occur in a language only if its native speakers can perceive stress contrasts, I argue that the presence of these exceptions depends on the age at which infants discover the stress rule of their language. If the stress regularity is easy to infer from the surface speech stream, then it will be acquired v…
Phonological Acquisition
Infants' phonological acquisition during the first 18 months of life has been studied within experimental psychology for some 30 years. Current research themes include statistical learning mechanisms, early lexical development, and models of phonetic category perception. So far, linguistic theories have hardly been taken into account. These theories are based upon the assumption that there is a common core of innate phonological knowledge across …
Assessing the distinctiveness of phonological features in word recognition
Signed and Spoken Language
Sign language has only recently become a topic of investigation in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. In this paper, we review research from these two fields; in particular, we compare spoken and signed language by looking at data concerning either cortical representations or early acquisition. As to cognitive neuroscience, we show that clinical neuropsychological data regarding sign language is partially inconsistent with imaging data…
Output-to-Output Identity in Word-Level Phonology
Preview this article: Output-to-Output Identity in Word-Level Phonology, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/avt.14.16pep-1.gif
Signed and Spoken Language
Sign language has only recently become a topic of investigation in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. In this paper, we review research from these two fields; in particular, we compare spoken and signed language by looking at data concerning either cortical representations or early acquisition. As to cognitive neuroscience, we show that clinical neuropsychological data regarding sign language is partially inconsistent with imaging data…
Prosodic Words
A robust method to study stress “deafness”
Previous research by Dupoux et al. [J. Memory Lang. 36, 406–421 (1997)] has shown that French participants, as opposed to Spanish participants, have difficulties in distinguishing nonwords that differ only in the location of stress. Contrary to Spanish, French does not have contrastive stress, and French participants are “deaf” to stress contrasts. The experimental paradigm used by Dupoux et al. (speeded ABX) yielded significant group differences…
Phonological Acquisition
Infants' phonological acquisition during the first 18 months of life has been studied within experimental psychology for some 30 years. Current research themes include statistical learning mechanisms, early lexical development, and models of phonetic category perception. So far, linguistic theories have hardly been taken into account. These theories are based upon the assumption that there is a common core of innate phonological knowledge across …
Discovering words in the continuous speech stream
Phonological phrase boundaries constrain lexical access I. Adult data
A Psycholinguistic Theory of Loanword Adaptations
Lexical Exceptions in Stress Systems
Some, but not all, languages with fixed stress exhibit lexical exceptions to their stress rule. Under the assumption that lexical exceptions can occur in a language only if its native speakers can perceive stress contrasts, I argue that the presence of these exceptions depends on the age at which infants discover the stress rule of their language. If the stress regularity is easy to infer from the surface speech stream, then it will be acquired v…
The influence of orthography on loanword adaptations
Apprentissage « bottom-up » des phonèmes
Nous présentons une étude computationnelle de l'hypothèse selon laquelle l'information distri-butionnelle est suffisante pour acquérir les règles allophoniques (et ainsi les phonèmes) de façon bottom-up. L'hypothèse a été testée en utilisant une mesure de la théorie de l'information qui compare les distributions. La phase de test a été conduite sur plusieurs corpus de langues artificielles et sur deux corpus de langues naturelles (constitués de t…
Persistent stress ‘deafness’
On the perceptual origin of loanword adaptations
Japanese shows an asymmetry in the treatment of word-final [n] in loanwords from English and French: while it is adapted as a moraic nasal consonant in loanwords from English, it is adapted with a following epenthetic vowel in loanwords from French. We provide experimental evidence that this asymmetry is due to phonetic differences in the realisation of word-final [n] in English and French, and, consequently, to the way in which English and Frenc…
Language‐specific stress perception by 9‐month‐old French and Spanish infants
During the first year of life, infants begin to have difficulties perceiving non-native vowel and consonant contrasts, thus adapting their perception to the phonetic categories of the target language. In this paper, we examine the perception of a non-segmental feature, i.e. stress. Previous research with adults has shown that speakers of French (a language with fixed stress) have great difficulties in perceiving stress contrasts (Dupoux, Pallier,…
Adaptation to Novel Accents
This paper examines whether adults can adapt to novel accents of their native language that contain unfamiliar context-dependent phonological alternations. In two experiments, French participants listen to short stories read in accented speech. Their knowledge of the accents is then tested in a forced-choice identification task. In Experiment 1, two groups of listeners are exposed to newly created French accents in which certain vowels harmonize …
Perception of predictable stress
Where do illusory vowels come from
Toddlers’ Processing of Phonological Alternations
Using a picture pointing task, this study examines toddlers' processing of phonological alternations that trigger sound changes in connected speech. Three experiments investigate whether 2;5- to 3-year-old children take into account assimilations--processes by which phonological features of one sound spread to adjacent sounds--for the purpose of word recognition (e.g., in English, ten pounds can be produced as te[mp]ounds). English toddlers (n = …
(Non)words, (non)words, (non)words
Previous research with artificial language learning paradigms has shown that infants are sensitive to statistical cues to word boundaries (Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996) and that they can use these cues to extract word-like units (Saffran, 2001). However, it is unknown whether infants use statistical information to construct a receptive lexicon when acquiring their native language. In order to investigate this issue, we rely on the fact that bes…
The Development of Word Stress Processing in French and Spanish Infants
This study focuses on the development of lexical stress perception during the first year of life. Previous research shows that cross-linguistic differences in word stress organization translate into differences in word stress processing from a very early age: At 9 months, Spanish-learning infants, learning a language with variable word stress, can discriminate between segmentally varied nonsense words with initial stress (e.g., níla, túli) and fi…
Learning Phonemes With a Proto‐Lexicon
Before the end of the first year of life, infants begin to lose the ability to perceive distinctions between sounds that are not phonemic in their native language. It is typically assumed that this developmental change reflects the construction of language-specific phoneme categories, but how these categories are learned largely remains a mystery. Peperkamp, Le Calvez, Nadal, and Dupoux (2006) present an algorithm that can discover phonemes using…
Similarity in the generalization of implicitly learned sound patterns
It is likely that generalization of implicitly learned sound patterns to novel words and sounds is structured by a similarity metric, but how may this metric best be captured? We report on an experiment where participants were exposed to an artificial phonology, and frequency ratings were used to probe implicit abstraction of onset statistics. Non-words bearing an onset that was presented during initial exposure were subsequently rated most frequ…
Early Word Recognition in Sentence Context
Recent work has shown that young children can use fine phonetic detail during the recognition of isolated and sentence‐final words from early in lexical development. The present study investigates 24‐month‐olds' word recognition in sentence‐medial position in two experiments using an Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm. In Experiment 1, French toddlers detect word‐final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., bu z [by z ] for bu s [by s ] “bus”), a…
Low inhibitory skill leads to non-native perception and production in bilinguals' native language
An experimental study of the role of social factors in language change
There is great variation in whether foreign sounds in loanwords are adapted or retained. Importantly, the retention of foreign sounds can lead to a sound change in the language. We propose that social factors influence the likelihood of loanword sound adaptation, and use this case to introduce a novel experimental paradigm for studying language change that captures the role of social factors. Specifically, we show that the relative prestige of th…
Linguistics (46 works) · Psychology (45 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (35 works) · Computer Science (25 works) · Perception (21 works) · Cognitive psychology (18 works) · Language Development and Disorders (16 works) · Phonology (15 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (14 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (14 works)