Steinhauer, K., Alter, K. & Friederici, A. D. (1999). Brain potentials indicate immediate use of prosodic cues in natural speech processing. Nature Neuroscience, 2 (2), 191-196.
Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Chris
Different from written language, spoken language provides prosodic cues such as rhythm, pauses, accents, amplitude, and pitch variations for listeners. The authors of this paper were interested in how this information could help listeners to decode speech signals. The paper has two specific aims. First, the authors wondered how intonational phrasing guides the initial analysis of sentence structures. The second aim was to demonstrate how prosodic processing is integrated with syntactic processing. In the experiments, sentences whose prosodic cues match/mismatch with the syntax were designed and shown to listeners. Results showed that prosodic information is sufficient to reverse syntactic parsing preferences. When a mismatch between syntax and prosody appears, there is a signal reflected in the N400-P600 pattern immediately. It was concluded that our brains have on-line prosody processing when dealing with incoming signals. An incorrect prosodic boundary is sufficient to mislead the listener’s sentence processor. As a result, prosodic information can be used directly to carry syntactic information.
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