Does orthographic training on a phonemic contrast absent in the listener's dialect influence word recognition?

International audienceThis study examined whether the ability of Southern French speakers to discriminate between the Standard French word forms /pike/ and /pikɛ/ can be improved, by means of a training procedure in which participants were exposed to the orthographic representations of words forming /e/-/ε/ minimal pairs. The results of the training procedure showed that Southern French speakers are able to perceive the /e/-/ε/ contrast in word final position when they associate these vowels with their correct spelled form. Importantly, immediately after training, Southern French speakers no longer treated the second member of trained minimal pairs as a repetition of the first member, and thus priming effect was no longer observed on the trained minimal pairs. However, our results also indicated that this training failed to change the way in which the untrained minimal pairs are processed and represented, since after training Southern French speakers still showed a priming effect on the untrained minimal pairs. Implications of these findings regarding the locus of the difficulties of the Southern French speakers with the word-final /e/-/ε/ contrast are discussed