Auditory evoked potentials reveal early perceptual effects of distal prosody on speech segmentation

Abstract

Prosodic context several syllables prior (i.e., distal) to an ambiguous word boundary influences speech segmentation. To assess whether distal prosody influences early perceptual processing or later lexical competition, EEG was recorded while subjects listened to eight-syllable sequences with ambiguous word boundaries for the last four syllables (e.g., tie murder bee vs. timer derby). Pitch and duration of the first 5 syllables were manipulated to induce sequence segmentation with either a monosyllabic or disyllabic final word. Behavioral results confirmed a successful manipulation. Moreover, penultimate syllables (e.g., der) elicited a larger anterior positivity 200–500 ms after onset for prosodic contexts predicted to induce word-initial perception of these syllables. Final syllables (e.g. bee) elicited a similar anterior positivity in the context predicted to induce word-initial perception of these syllables. Additionally, these final syllables elicited a larger positive-to-negative deflection (P1-N1) 60–120 ms after onset, and a larger N400. The finding that prosodic characteristics of speech several syllables prior to ambiguous word boundaries modulate both early and late ERPs elicited by subsequent syllable onsets provides evidence that distal prosody influences early perceptual processing, and later lexical competition.

Not just a function of function words: Distal speech rate influences perception of prosodically weak syllables

“…The results suggested that listeners utilized the rate information to resolve this ambiguity in exactly the ways that were predicted if word recognition is sensitive to distal speech rate in timed lexical processing. These results are compatible with previous studies demonstrating the influence of distal rate on word segmentation (e.g., Breen, Dilley, McAuley, & Sanders, 2014;Brown, Dilley, & Tanenhaus, 2012) using a different experimental paradigm. Thus, the results provide further support that distal speech rate is a powerful factor in word segmentation, assisting with perception of weak syllables lacking clear amplitude envelope cues.…”

Effects of metric hierarchy and rhyme predictability on word duration in The Cat in the Hat

“…Specifically, regular metric patterns allow listeners to make predictions about when in time upcoming information is going to occur (Huron, 2006;Fitzroy & Sanders, 2015). Moreover, adult listeners have been shown to exploit regular metric patterns as cues to speech segmentation (Mattys & Samuel, 1997), lexical organization (Breen, Dilley, McAuley, & Sanders, 2014), syntactic structure (Schmidt-Kassow & Kotz, 2009), and semantic structure (Rothermich, Schmidt-Kassow, & Kotz, 2012). One explanation for these effects, therefore, is that regular metric patterns direct listeners' temporal attention to important sentence material, thereby facilitating comprehension Pitt & Samuel, 1990;Quené & Port, 2005).…”

Pre-Activation Negativity (PrAN) in Brain Potentials to Unfolding Words

“…In spoken language processing, listeners have to be able to quickly access the meaning of words in a stream of speech which unfolds rapidly over time. To achieve this, it has been shown that listeners take advantage of cues that can be used to predict upcoming information, such as specific words or prosodic structures (DeLong et al, 2005 ; van Berkum et al, 2005 ; Breen et al, 2014 ; Norris et al, 2016 ). Even before hearing a complete word, listeners are thought to fully or partially pre-activate competing similar-sounding candidates that constitute candidates for whole words (e.g., Morton, 1969 ; Luce, 1986 ; McClelland and Elman, 1986 ; Marslen-Wilson, 1987 ; Norris, 1994 ; Pierrehumbert, 2003 ).…”