Comprehension and memory representations of r'duced words in Dutch learners of French

While most researchers now assume that the mental lexicon contains both abstract representations and exemplars, exemplar research has barely been applied to second language (L2) learners. We investigated the reduction phenomenon of high vowel devoicing in casual French: in a word like la cité, the /i/ can be devoiced as voicing fails to be reestablished in time after the /s/. Our research question was: Can L2 learners show exemplar effects (i.e. a target matching its prime is responded to faster than a mismatching target) in a lexical decision task using devoicing? We tested 160 Dutch university students with intermediate proficiency in French. In Exp1, we used different recordings (or tokens) for the primes and the targets. In Exp2 we used the same token (B) for prime and target, and in Exp3 we only used token A. We obtained exemplar effects in Exp3 but not in Exp2. Surprisingly, Exp1 yielded a significant mismatch result: the voiced tokens were answered to significantly faster when they were primed by the devoiced tokens than the voiced ones, and conversely. Only token A, but not token B, as prime triggered significant matching or mismatching effects. The encoding of the prime thus seems to be important for such effects. However, it is hard to imagine why would token A prime a mismatching token B, but not a matching token B. Token B as target must thus be responsible for the mismatch effect found in Exp1, although, it is unclear by which mechanism. It is clear, however, that the role of exemplars in speech comprehension is probably much more limited than currently assumed