Journal Articles

• Martin, A., & S. Peperkamp (2017). Assessing the distinctiveness of phonological features in word recognition: prelexical and lexical influences. Journal of Phonetics, 62, 1–11.
  Phonological features have been shown to differ from one another in their perceptual weight during word recognition. Here, we examine two possible sources of these asymmetries: bottom-up acoustic perception (some featural contrasts are acoustically more different than others), and top-down lexical knowledge (some contrasts are used more to distinguish words in the lexicon). We focus on French nouns, in which voicing mispronunciations are perceived as closer to canonical pronunciations than both place and manner mispronunciations, indicating that voicing is less important than place and manner for distinguishing words from one another. We find that this result can be accounted for by coalescing the two sources of bias. First, using a prelexical discrimination paradigm, we show that manner contrasts have the highest baseline perceptual salience, while there is no difference between place and voicing. Second, using a novel method to compute the functional load of phonological features, we show that the place feature is most often recruited to distinguish nouns in the French lexicon, while voicing and manner are exploited equally often.
• Martin, A., & S. Peperkamp (2015). Asymmetries in the exploitation of phonetic features for word recognition. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(4), EL303–EL317.
  French listeners’ reliance on voicing, manner, and place was tested in a mispronunciation detection task. Mispronounced words were more likely to be recognized when the mispronunciation concerned voicing rather than manner or place. This indicates that listeners rely less on the former than on the latter for the purposes of word recognition. Further, the role of visual cues to phonetic features was explored by the task being conducted in both an audio-only and an audiovisual version, but no effect of modality was found. Discussion focuses on cross-linguistic comparisons and lexical factors that might influence the weight of individual features.
• Fort, M., A. Martin, & S. Peperkamp (2015). Consonants are more important than vowels in the bouba-kiki effect. Language and Speech, 58(2), 247–266.
  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 consonant pairs with a wide range of vowels (Experiment 1 and 2) or two vowel pairs with a wide range of consonants (Experiment 3). Analyses showed that consonants have a greater influence than vowels in the bouba-kiki effect. This asymmetry cannot be due to an onset bias, as a strong consonantal influence is found both with CVCV (Experiment 1) and VCV (Experiment 2) stimuli. We discuss these results in terms of the differential role of consonants and vowels in speech perception.

Conference Proceedings

• Fort, M., A. Weiss, A. Martin , & S. Peperkamp (2013). Looking for the bouba-kiki effect in prelexical infants. In: S. Ouni, F. Berthommier & A. Jesse (eds.) Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing. INRIA, 71–76.
  Adults and toddlers systematically associate certain pseudowords, such as ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’, with round and spiky shapes, respectively. The ontological origin of this so-called bouba-kiki effect is unknown: it could be an unlearned aspect of perception, appear with language exposure, or only emerge with the ability to produce speech sounds (i.e., babbling). We report the results of three experiments with five- and six-month-olds that found no bouba-kiki effect at all. We discuss the consequences of these findings for the emergence of cross-modal associations in infant speech perception.