Processing resyllabified words in French

In French, the final [ ] of dernier is not pronounced in dernier train (last train), but is pronounced, in the following syllable, in a liaison environment like dernier oignon (last onion). Due to liaison, dernier oignon becomes homophonous with dernier rognon (last kidney). In four pairs of cross-modal priming experiments, French participants made visual lexical decisions to vowelor consonant-initial targets (e.g., oignon, rognon) following both versions of spoken sentences like C’est le dernier oignon/rognon. Facilitation was found for both types of target when targets matched the speaker s intended segmentation, but was weaker when they mismatched the intended segmentation. In unambiguous sentences there was facilitation only for targets matching the speaker s intentions. The consonants in the liaison environments were shorter than the word-initial consonants (e.g., [ ] in dernier oignon vs. rognon). Word recognition therefore appears to be influenced by subphonemic cues to the words that speakers intend. 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.