Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.g., an extended conversation). Results demonstrated that listeners tracked variation in the overall pace of speech over an extended duration (analogous to that of a conversation that listeners might have outside the lab) and that this global speech rate influenced which words listeners reported hearing. The effects of speech rate became stronger over time. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that neural entrainment by speech occurs on multiple timescales, some lasting more than an hour.

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A defining trait of linguistic competence is the ability to combine elements into increasingly complex structures to denote, and to comprehend, a potentially infinite number of meanings. Recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) work has investigated these processes by comparing the response to nouns in combinatorial (blue car) and non-combinatorial (rnsh car) contexts. In the current study we extended this paradigm using electroencephalography (EEG) to dissociate the role of semantic content from phonological well-formedness (yerl car). We used event-related potential (ERP) recordings in order to better relate the observed neurophysiological correlates of basic combinatorial operations to prior ERP work on comprehension. We found that nouns in combinatorial contexts (blue car) elicited a greater centro-parietal negativity between 180-400ms, independent of the phonological well-formedness of the context word. We discuss the potential relationship between this ‘combinatorial’ effect and classic N400 effects. We also report preliminary evidence for an early anterior negative deflection immediately preceding the critical noun in combinatorial contexts, which we tentatively interpret as an electrophysiological reflex of syntactic structure initialization.

What structural properties do language and music share? Although early speculation identified a wide variety of possibilities, the literature has largely focused on the parallels between musical structure and syntactic structure. Here, we argue that parallels between musical structure and prosodic structure deserve more attention. We review the evidence for a link between musical and prosodic structure and find it to be strong. In fact, certain elements of prosodic structure may provide a parsimonious comparison with musical structure without sacrificing empirical findings related to the parallels between language and music. We then develop several predictions related to such a hypothesis.

During lexical access, listeners use both signalbased and knowledge-based cues, and information from the linguistic context can affect the perception of acoustic speech information. Recent findings suggest that the various cues used in lexical access are implemented with flexibility and may be affected by information from the larger speech context. We conducted 2 experiments to examine effects of a signal-based cue (distal speech rate) and a knowledge-based cue (linguistic structure) on lexical perception. In Experiment 1, we manipulated distal speech rate in utterances where an acoustically ambiguous critical word was either obligatory for the utterance to be syntactically well formed (e.g., Conner knew that bread and butter (are) both in the pantry) or optional (e.g., Don must see the harbor (or) boats). In Experiment 2, we examined identical target utterances as in Experiment 1 but changed the distribution of linguistic structures in the fillers. The results of the 2 experiments demonstrate that speech rate and linguistic knowledge about critical word obligatoriness can both influence speech perception. In addition, it is possible to alter the strength of a signal-based cue by changing information in the speech environment. These results provide support for models of word segmentation that include flexible weighting of signal-based and knowledge-based cues.