Event-related responses reflect chunk boundaries in natural speech

Anurova, Irina; Vetchinnikova, Svetlana; Dobrego, Aleksandra; Williams, Nitin; Mikušová, Nina; Suni, Antti; Mauranen, Anna; Palva, Satu

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2022.119203

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 107 publications

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“…While listening to the extracts, they intuitively marked chunk boundaries in the accompanying transcripts through a custom-built tablet application. In earlier research, we validated the method and showed that silent pauses inserted at intuitively marked chunk boundaries elicit a CPS while when inserted within a chunk they elicit a biphasic emitted potential suggesting interrupted processing (Anurova et al, 2022;Vetchinnikova et al, 2022). In this paper, we explored to what extent naïve listeners are affected by a range of different linguistic cues and cognitive constraints in chunk boundary perception.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Using automatic and manual means, we identified 97 10-to-45-s-long excerpts ( M = 55 words, SD = 14, min = 29, max = 100, and total = 5237 words) which were fluent and intelligible without wider context. We avoided unintelligible or unfinished words, laughter, long pauses, overlapping speech, speaker changes, frequent hesitations, or repetitions and controlled for specialized and low-frequency vocabulary: some of these criteria are stipulated by a parallel brain imaging experiment we report in Anurova et al (2022). Since the audio quality of the original extracts was uneven, we recruited a speaker who read out the extracts mimicking the prosodic patterns of the original audio clips as close as possible.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Chunking up speech in real time: linguistic predictors and cognitive constraints

et al. 2023

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There have been some suggestions in linguistics and cognitive science that humans process continuous speech by routinely chunking it up into smaller units. The nature of the process is open to debate, which is complicated by the apparent existence of two entirely different chunking processes, both of which seem to be warranted by the limitations of working memory. To overcome them, humans seem to both combine items into larger units for future retrieval (usage-based chunking), and partition incoming streams into temporal groups (perceptual chunking). To determine linguistic properties and cognitive constraints of perceptual chunking, most previous research has employed short-constructed stimuli modeled on written language. In contrast, we presented linguistically naïve listeners with excerpts of natural speech from corpora and collected their intuitive perceptions of chunk boundaries. We then used mixed-effects logistic regression models to find out to what extent pauses, prosody, syntax, chunk duration, and surprisal predict chunk boundary perception. The results showed that all cues were important, suggesting cue degeneracy, but with substantial variation across listeners and speech excerpts. Chunk duration had a strong effect, supporting the cognitive constraint hypothesis. The direction of the surprisal effect supported the distinction between perceptual and usage-based chunking.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chunking up speech in real time: linguistic predictors and cognitive constraints

et al. 2023

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“…To the best of our knowledge, all studies concerning the CPS employ constructed and digitally manipulated sentences in isolated presentation conditions or with minimal context only. One exception is a recent study, that used reproduced speech segments that were originally recorded in natural environments (Anurova et al, 2022). However, this study included a pause-insertion manipulation at valid boundary positions as well as non-boundary positions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intonation Units in spontaneous speech evoke a neural response

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et al. 2023

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Spontaneous speech is produced in chunks called Intonation Units (IUs). IUs are defined by a set of prosodic cues and occur in all human languages. Linguistic theory suggests that IUs pace the flow of information and serve as a window onto the dynamic focus of attention in speech processing. IUs provide a promising and hitherto unexplored theoretical framework for studying the neural mechanisms of communication, thanks to their universality and their consistent temporal structure across different grammatical and socio-cultural conditions. In this article, we identify a neural response unique to the boundary defined by the IU. We measured the EEG of participants who listened to different speakers recounting an emotional life event. We analyzed the speech stimuli linguistically, and modeled the EEG response at word offset using a GLM approach. We find that the EEG response to IU-final words differs from the response to IU-nonfinal words when acoustic boundary strength is held constant. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this is demonstrated in spontaneous speech under naturalistic listening conditions, and under a theoretical framework that connects the prosodic chunking of speech, on the one hand, with the flow of information during communication, on the other. Finally, we relate our findings to the body of research on rhythmic brain mechanism in speech processing by comparing the topographical distributions of neural speech tracking in model-predicted and empirical EEG. This qualitative comparison suggests that IU-related neural activity contributes to the previously characterized delta-band neural speech tracking.

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“…Prosody may convey affective (i.e., expression of emotions) and/or linguistic information. Prosody-related linguistic information enables the segmentation of utterances into speech units with acoustically defined boundaries [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ], which is commonly referred to as prosodic phrasing. Prosodic words, phonological phrases (relatable to clause components like noun or verb phrases) and intonational phrases (relatable to clauses) form a hierarchy of prosodically defined speech units [ 1 , 4 , 8 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increased Pre-Boundary Lengthening Does Not Enhance Implicit Intonational Phrase Perception in European Portuguese: An EEG Study

et al. 2023

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Prosodic phrasing is the segmentation of utterances into prosodic words, phonological phrases (smaller units) and intonational phrases (larger units) based on acoustic cues—pauses, pitch changes and pre-boundary lengthening. The perception of prosodic boundaries is characterized by a positive event-related potential (ERP) component, temporally aligned with phrase boundaries—the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). The role of pre-boundary lengthening in boundary perception is still a matter of debate: while studies on phonological phrase boundaries indicate that all three cues contribute equally, approaches to intonational phrase boundaries highlight the pause as the most powerful cue. Moreover, all studies used explicit boundary recognition tasks, and it is unknown how pre-boundary lengthening works in implicit prosodic processing tasks, characteristic of real-life contexts. In this study, we examined the effects of pre-boundary lengthening (original, short, and long) on the EEG responses to intonational phrase boundaries (CPS effect) in European Portuguese, using an implicit task. Both original and short versions showed equivalent CPS effects, while the long set did not elicit the effect. This suggests that pre-boundary lengthening does not contribute to improved perception of boundaries in intonational phrases (longer units), possibly due to memory and attention-related constraints.

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Event-related responses reflect chunk boundaries in natural speech

Cited by 11 publications

References 107 publications

Chunking up speech in real time: linguistic predictors and cognitive constraints

Chunking up speech in real time: linguistic predictors and cognitive constraints

Intonation Units in spontaneous speech evoke a neural response

Increased Pre-Boundary Lengthening Does Not Enhance Implicit Intonational Phrase Perception in European Portuguese: An EEG Study

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