Word stress representations are language‐specific: Evidence from event‐related brain potentials

Abstract

Understanding speech at the basic levels entails the simultaneous and independent processing of phonemic and prosodic features. While it is well-established that phoneme perception relies on language-specific long-term traces, it is unclear if the processing of prosodic features similarly involves language-specific representations. In the present study, we investigated the processing of a specific prosodic feature, word stress, using the method of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) employing a crosslinguistic approach. Hungarian participants heard disyllabic pseudowords stressed either on the first (legal stress) or on the second (illegal stress) syllable, pronounced either by a Hungarian or a German speaker. Results obtained using a data-driven ERP analysis methodology showed that all pseudowords in the deviant position elicited an Early Differentiating Negativity and a Mismatch Negativity component, except for the Hungarian pseudowords stressed on the first syllable. This suggests that Hungarian listeners did not process the native legal stress pattern as deviant, but the same stress pattern with a nonnative accent was processed as deviant. This implies that the processing of word stress was based on language-specific long-term memory traces. K E Y W O R D SERP, MMN, prosody, speech, word stress 2 of 12 | HONBOLYGÓ et aL.

Perception of Prosodic Modulations of Linguistic and Paralinguistic Origin: Evidence From Early Auditory Event-Related Potentials

“…These changes found are in agreement with the main characteristics of the MMN response; negative going wave of fronto-central maximum, typically peaking at 100–250 ms synchronized to the acoustic change onset ( Näätänen et al, 2007 ). This MMN response, verified also by the t tests, confirms the brain’s automatic reaction to prosodic modulations of different origin (be it low level sensory and high level cognitive) in the auditory input, which is in line with previous research (e.g., Näätänen et al, 1978 ; Honbolygó et al, 2004 , 2020 ; Weber et al, 2004 ; Friederici et al, 2007 ; Zora et al, 2015 , 2016a , 2020 ; Garami et al, 2017 ).…”

“…The MMN component is based on an oddball paradigm, where a deviant stimulus is interspersed among frequent standard stimuli, and signals the brain’s automatic reaction to deviations in auditory input at around 100–250 ms after divergence point and with a fronto-central scalp distribution ( Näätänen et al, 1978 , 2007 ). The MMN response successfully indicates neural correlates of both low-level acoustic and high-level cognitive processing associated with prosodic information (e.g., Näätänen et al, 1978 ; Honbolygó et al, 2004 , 2020 ; Weber et al, 2004 ; Friederici et al, 2007 ; Zora et al, 2015 , 2016a , b , 2019 , 2020 ; Garami et al, 2017 ). Previous research indicated MMN activation to linguistic prosody change in Swedish words that are distinguished on the sole basis of pitch accent, fasen 1 “the phase” and fasen 2 “expletive,” reflecting the activation of different lexical items in the brain based on prosody ( Zora et al, 2020 ).…”

Mismatch Negativity (MMN): Komponen Event-Related Potentials (ERP) sebagai Penanda Aktivitas Otomatis Otak dalam Mendeteksi Perubahan

“…MMN merupakan indeks objektif terhadap kemampuan akurasi individu dalam mendiskriminasi suara maupun sebagai penanda untuk sensori memori (Jaaskelainen et al, 1999;Näätänen et al, 2005;Sams et al, 1993;Winkler et al, 1993), attention switching (Squires et al, 1975;Sussman et al, 2003), pemrosesan bahasa (Honbolygó et al, 2020;Kostilainen et al, 2018;Kotzor et al, * Alamat Korespondensi: zulfikrikhakim@gmail.com 2017), hingga musik (Kliuchko et al, 2019;Vuust et al, 2011). MMN telah digunakan dalam konteks klinis seperti skizofrenia (Jarkiewicz & Wichniak, 2015;Koshiyama et al, 2020), dyslexia (Baldeweg et al, 1999;Korne et al, 1998), pada pasien koma dan dapat digunakan untuk memprediksi siuman (Fischer et al, 2006), berbagai kondisi gangguan pendengaran (Engstrom et al, 2021;Fernandes et al, 2019;Kliuchko et al, 2016), gangguan mood (Bissonnette et al, 2020;Kim et al, 2020), hingga pasien sakit kronis (Fan et al, 2018).…”

“…pelanggaran sintaksis pada bahasa ibu (Hanna et al, 2017;Pulvermüller & Shtyrov, 2003;Pulvermüller et al, 2008), kandungan semantik emosional (Zora et al, 2020), efek pelatihan bahasa (Aleksandrov et al, 2019), serta informasi prosodi seperti penekanan nada suara komparatif baik antar bahasa (Garami et al, 2017;Honbolygó et al, 2020) maupun aksen regional (Brunellière et al, 2011). Penelitian mengenai representasi fonemik (Cummings et al, 2021;Riedinger et al, 2021) menemukan adanya asimetris MMN di mana beberapa suara ucap menimbulkan MMN sementara suara lain tidak.…”

“…Hal ini selama Stimulus Deviant memiliki karakteristik yang dapat dibedakan melebihi ambang batas kemampuan diskriminasi partisipan(Näätänen & Kreegipuu, 2011). Stimulus Standard akan membangun jejak memori, yang apabila stimulus yang baru Deviant muncul selama jejak memori aktif, sistem pendeteksi perubahan akan terpicu dan termanifestasi pada MMN.Oleh pertimbangan tersebut, Stimulus Standard umumnya akan diberikan beberapa kali sebelum menyisipkan Deviant (misalnya 15 stimulus pertama selalu Standard) pada penelitianHonbolygó et al (2020) untuk membangun jejak memori(Näätänen et al, 2007). Selain itu, ketika dua Deviant muncul secara berturut-turut, MMN pada Deviant kedua akan menunjukkan kekuatan MMN yang lebih rendah sehingga perlu menghindari kemunculan Deviant yang berturut-turut.…”