Noun/verb distinction in English stress homographs

Abstract

Sensitivity to speech rhythm, especially the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, is an important aspect of language acquisition and comprehension from infancy through adulthood. In English, a strong correlation exists between speech rhythm and grammatical class. This property is well illustrated by a particular group of noun/verb homographs that are spelled the same but are pronounced with a lexical stress on the first syllable when used as a noun or on the second syllable when used as a verb. The purpose of this study was to further examine the neural markers of speech rhythm and its role in word recognition. To this end, event-related brain potentials were recorded while participants listened to spoken sentences containing a stress homograph either in a noun or a verb position. The rhythmic structure of the stress homographs was manipulated so that they were pronounced with a stress pattern that either matched or mismatched their grammatical class. Results of cluster-based permutation tests on the event-related brain potentials revealed larger negativities over the centrofrontal scalp regions when the stress homographs were mispronounced, in line with previous studies on lexical ambiguity resolution. In addition, differences between rhythmically unexpected nouns and verbs could be seen as early as 200 ms, suggesting that listeners are sensitive to statistical properties of their language rhythm. Together, these results support the hypothesis that information about speech rhythm is rapidly integrated during speech perception and contributes to lexical retrieval.

Cross-Modal Priming Effect of Rhythm on Visual Word Recognition and Its Relationships to Music Aptitude and Reading Achievement

“…This finding is in line with previous ERP studies on speech rhythm and meter [6,15,20,28,31,48,49,50]. It has been generally proposed that this negative effect either reflects an increased N400 [15,49], or a domain-general rule-based error-detection mechanism [6,20,28,31,51,52]. The fact that similar negative effects have been reported in response to metric deviations in tone sequences (e.g., [53,54]) further supports the latter interpretation.…”

“…By contrast, several languages are considered to have variable stress because the position of the stress is not predictable. In such languages, like English, stress may serve as a distinctive feature to distinguish noun-verb stress homographs [6]. For example, the word “permit” is stressed on the first syllable when used as a noun, but stressed on the second syllable when used as a verb.…”

Cross-Modal Priming Effect of Rhythm on Visual Word Recognition and Its Relationships to Music Aptitude and Reading Achievement

“…As hypothesized, trochaic target words that did not match the rhythmic structure of the auditory prime were associated with an increased negativity over the centro-frontal part of the scalp. This finding is in line with previous ERP studies on speech rhythm and meter [11,16,21,24,[39][40][41][42]. It has been generally proposed that this negative effect either reflects an increased N400 [11,40], or a domain-general rule-based errordetection mechanism [16,21,24,[42][43][44].…”

The Brain Dynamics of Syllable Duration and Semantic Predictability in Spanish

“…The relevance of duration features in prosody has been investigated throughout different approaches, such as neuropsychological [17,18] and electrophysiological [19][20][21][22][23]. Neuropsychological studies have shown that duration features in prosody can be used to distinguish lexical items both in speech perception [17] and production [18].…”