Brain responses to syntax constrained by time-driven implicit prosodic phrases

Abstract

a b s t r a c tPrevious research suggests that time-based working memory limits of 2e3 s constrain the integration of verbal information, and that speakers tend to parse sentences into prosodic phrases that do not extend beyond this time window. The present study used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to investigate how time-driven implicit prosodic phrasing influences the syntactic processing of embedded clauses. Participants read Swedish sentences in which the first embedded clause had a subordinate, main or neutral clause structure cued by the position of the sentence adverb. The presentation rate was manipulated so that either one or two clauses were read within 2.7 s. When the 2.7 s time limit was reached before the onset of the embedded clause, the sentence adverb indicating subordinate clause structure elicited a posterior negativity and a late positivity. These effects were interpreted to reflect the detection of unexpected word order, followed by the revision of the anticipated main clause structure. A positive shift that correlated with individual working memory span was also seen at the clause-final word after 2.7 s, possibly indicating closure of an implicit prosodic phrase. These results suggest that prosodic phrasing was influenced by time-based working memory limits, which in turn affected syntactic analysis: readers were more likely to interpret an embedded clause as a main clause if it could be associated with the beginning of a new prosodic phrase.

The neural oscillations of speech processing and language comprehension: state of the art and emerging mechanisms

“…Hence, rather than thinking that delta‐band oscillations specifically fit the necessities of language comprehension, syntactic phrases as a linguistic phenomenon should rather be viewed as an ideal means of exploiting the brain's pre‐existing chunking abilities. In line with this speculation, event‐related brain potentials indexing the chunking of words into syntactic phrases occur with a regular period (2.6–2.7 s; Roll et al ., ; Schremm et al ., ) that matches the canonical duration of syntactic phrases observed in linguistic corpus analyses (Vollrath et al ., ) and falls into the frequency range of either the lower delta band or slow cortical potentials. Such slow frequencies might just suffice electrophysiologically to integrate information on the time and network scales needed for the composition of complex information—the brain employs long cycles when integrating complex information across large networks, given the variance in conduction delays of large neuronal networks (Buzsaki, ).…”

Rhythm Comes, Rhythm Goes: Short-Term Periodicity of Prosodic Phrasing

“…For speech, a memory interval of six words has been proposed, translating to roughly 2.4 seconds at average speech rates (Frazier & Fodor, 1978;Tauroza & Allison, 1990). A similar value of 2.7 seconds has been observed in electrophysiological studies (Hwang & Steinhauer, 2011;Roll et al, 2012;Webman-Shafran et al, 2015;Schremm et al, 2015;Bögels et al, 2011).…”

Synchronous, but not entrained: exogenous and endogenous cortical rhythms of speech and language processing

“…This bias is strong enough to override exogenous prosodic cues that indicate phrase durations outside of the preferred phrasing period (Meyer, Elsner, Turker, Kuhnke, & Hartwigsen, 2018;Meyer et al, 2016). Furthermore, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) associated with the grouping of words into implicit phrases appear with a regular period that does not require the presence of periodic exogenous prosodic cues (Roll, Lindgren, Alter, & Horne, 2012;Schremm, Horne, & Roll, 2015;Steinhauer, Alter, & Friederici, 1999). Hidden in the frequency domain of such periodically occurring ERPs, there may be a slow-frequency oscillator that is synchronous with internally generated syntactic representations.…”