Effects of Cooperating and Conflicting Prosody in Spoken English Garden Path Sentences: ERP Evidence for the Boundary Deletion Hypothesis

Abstract

Abstract■ In reading, a comma in the wrong place can cause more severe misunderstandings than the lack of a required comma. Here, we used ERPs to demonstrate that a similar effect holds for prosodic boundaries in spoken language. Participants judged the acceptability of temporarily ambiguous English "garden path" sentences whose prosodic boundaries were either in line or in conflict with the actual syntactic structure. Sentences with incongruent boundaries were accepted less than those with missing boundaries and elicited a stronger on-line brain response in ERPs (N400/P600 components). Our results support the notion that mentally deleting an overt prosodic boundary is more costly than postulating a new one and extend previous findings, suggesting an immediate role of prosody in sentence comprehension. Importantly, our study also provides new details on the profile and temporal dynamics of the closure positive shift (CPS), an ERP component assumed to reflect prosodic phrasing in speech and music in real time. We show that the CPS is reliably elicited at the onset of prosodic boundaries in English sentences and is preceded by negative components. Its early onset distinguishes the speech CPS in adults both from prosodic ERP correlates in infants and from the "music CPS" previously reported for trained musicians. ■

Misleading Bias-Driven Expectations in Referential Processing and the Facilitative Role of Contrastive Accent

“…These studies have demonstrated that IC bias information is influential in pronoun resolution prior to referential disambiguation downstream and therefore may play a predictive role regarding the pronoun's referent. Prosodic information is also often available prior to lexical disambiguating information in referential ambiguities (Ito & Speer, 2008;Weber et al, 2006) as well as structural ambiguities (Pauker, Itzhak, Baum, & Steinhauer, 2011;Steinhauer, Alter, & Friederici, 1999), and can potentially interact with IC bias information in order to improve processing efficiency. Prosodic information has previously been shown to play a facilitative role when interacting with structural biases in the context of parsing ambiguities (Itzhak, Pauker, Drury, Baum, & Steinhauer, 2010).…”

Musical phrase boundaries, wrap-up and the closure positive shift

“…The language CPS has been elicited at the boundary onset (Kerkhofs et al, 2007;Pauker et al, 2011), and the music component at the boundary offset. These latency differences have been accounted for by the fact that speech provides more and earlier boundary cues than music (Knoesche et al, 2005;Neuhaus et al, 2006).…”

The Role of prosodic skills in reading comprehension

“…An important distinction to note is that Honbolygo et al (2016) found increased processing for misleading prosody (reversing the intonation contour of the embedded clause), whereas the experimental sentences in the study 3 contain an absence of, rather than misleading, prosodic information. Pauker et al (2011) found that misleading prosody, where a superfluous prosodic boundary needed to be deleted for the listener to comprehend the spoken sentence, led to increased syntactic processing, as evidenced by a larger P600 waveform than for sentences presented without prosodic information. In other words, the absence of prosody in spoken sentences, where listeners needed to supply their own prosody led to syntactic revision, that was less costly than mentally deleting misleading prosodic boundaries.…”

“…Listeners use prosodic information to assist comprehension 20 of utterances including resolution of ambiguities (Kjelgaard & Speer, 1999). Further support for the rapid integration of prosody into spoken language is provided by electroencephalography (EEG) studies, where the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) is elicited in response to an intonational prosodic boundary, prior to syntactic processing occurring (Pauker, Itzhak, Baum, & Steinhauer, 2011;Steinhauer & Friederici, 2001). …”

“…However, it is not possible to directly compare EEG data for auditory and written sentences, due to the many different processes involved in visual versus auditory word recognition. Therefore, an 'auditory analogue of reading', as posited by Pauker et al (2011) , was used in the present study. For this analogue condition, auditory sentences were manipulated to remove prosodic cues, to simulate the information available to the reader, once word identification has been achieved.…”