Speaking Style Influences the Brain's Electrophysiological Response to Grammatical Errors in Speech Comprehension

Abstract

This electrophysiological study asked whether the brain processes grammatical gender violations in casual speech differently than in careful speech. Native speakers of Dutch were presented with utterances that contained adjective-noun pairs in which the adjective was either correctly inflected with a word-final schwa (e.g., een spannende roman, "a suspenseful novel") or incorrectly uninflected without that schwa ( een spannend roman). Consistent with previous findings, the uninflected adjectives elicited an electrical brain response sensitive to syntactic violations when the talker was speaking in a careful manner. When the talker was speaking in a casual manner, this response was absent. A control condition showed electrophysiological responses for carefully as well as casually produced utterances with semantic anomalies, showing that listeners were able to understand the content of both types of utterance. The results suggest that listeners take information about the speaking style of a talker into account when processing the acoustic-phonetic information provided by the speech signal. Absent schwas in casual speech are effectively not grammatical gender violations. These changes in syntactic processing are evidence of contextually driven neural flexibility.

Increased exposure and phonetic context help listeners recognize allophonic variants

“…Furthermore, in an EEG study using Turkish-accented Dutch, Hanulíková, van Alphen, van Goch, and Weber (2012) showed that the way morphosyntactic violations are processed by native listeners is influenced by their knowledge of the accent of the speaker. Viebahn, Ernestus, and McQueen (2017) obtained a similar result for morpho-syntactic violations that can occur in casually produced Dutch. In particular, the authors demonstrated that schwas that serve as grammatical markers were perceived as grammatical errors when the speaker talked with a careful speaking style.…”

Not all errors are the same: ERP sensitivity to error typicality in foreign accented speech perception

“…Both explanations support the idea that the brain can adapt to changes in distributional properties of linguistic input and refine its expectations about the upcoming structures based on previous experience (Fraundorf & Jaeger, 2016;Kleinschmidt, Fine, & Jaeger, 2012;Luka & Barsalou, 2005;Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008;Viebhan et al, 2017).…”

“…This suggests that the speaker's accent has an impact on the time course of syntactic analysis in native listeners. Following the authors' interpretation of the P600 modulation (Hanulíková et al, 2012), native listeners would be able to make inferences based on the speaker's accent and change their expectations about the grammaticality of the sentences according to their world knowledge (for a similar interpretation see Van Berkum, van den Brink, Tesink, Kos, &Hagoort, 2008 andViebhan, Ernestus, &McQueen, 2017). Since foreign accent is often associated with the presence of grammatical errors, native listeners would consider these violations as highly probable in foreign accented speech, and would thus reduce their attempts of grammatical repair (reflected by the P600).…”

Speaking Style Modulates Morphosyntactic Expectations in Young and Older Adults: Evidence from a Sentence Repetition Task

“…There is growing evidence that listeners use both linguistic and extralinguistic context to predict linguistic behavior (for a review, see Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016). Several studies have shown that speaking style and a talker's accent can hinder and facilitate morphosyntactic processing (e.g., 2 Hanulíková et al, 2012;Hanulíková, 2019;Staum Casasanto, 2008;Viebahn, Ernestus, & McQueen, 2017;Weissler & Brennan, 2020). For example, non-standard use of grammatical gender agreement in Dutch (*het winkel instead of de winkel, 'the store'; een *groen winkel instead of een groene winkel, 'a green store') has been shown to cause higher processing cost (in terms of a more pronounced P600 effect) when the speaker had a native Dutch accent compared to a non-native (Turkish) accent (Hanulíková et al, 2012).…”

“…Similar to language varieties and foreign-accented speech, alternations of speaking style (casual vs. careful) can facilitate the processing of morphosyntactic violations (Viebahn et al, 2017). In Dutch, schwa reduction in inflected adjectives can render gender agreement incorrect (een *spannend roman vs. een spannende roman, 'a suspenseful novel').…”