Phonotactic constraints help to overcome effects of schwa deletion in French

In a crossmodal priming experiment, visual targets (e.g. RENARD, ‘fox’) were auditorily primed by either an intact [lʁnaʁ] ‘the fox’ or reduced form [lʁnaʁ] ‘the fox’ of the word. When schwa deletion gave rise to an initial cluster that respected the phonotactic constraints of French (e.g. [lapluz] ‘the lawn’ in which /pl/ is a legal word beginning in French), there was a processing cost for the targets primed by the reduced form of the word compared to intact primes (e.g. [lapluz] ‘the lawn’). However, when schwa deletion produced an initial cluster that violated the phonotactic constraints of French (e.g. [lʁnaʁ], where /Rn/ is not allowed as a word beginning), there was no penalty for targets primed by reduced compared to intact forms of the word. Assuming that listeners change their phonemic percept when confronted with phonotactically illegal sequences (Segui, Frauenfelder, & Hallé, 2001), phonotactic constraints may help to restore the deleted schwa in sequences like le renard [lʁnaʁ] in French.