Prosodic phrasing is central to language comprehension

Frazier, Lyn; Carlson, Katy; Clifton, Charles

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2006.04.002

Cited by 347 publications

(190 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Such results, together with the ones presented here, should have important consequences for the pedagogical methods used for foreign language learning. Based upon the growing evidence pointing to the importance of prosody for language comprehension (Frazier et al, 2006), it may prove useful to develop learning programs relying on the spoken form of languages. Musical training may be particularly useful in this context.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) method, known for its excellent temporal resolution, is particularly well suited to this aim. Here, we used the ERPs to determine whether musicians are more efficient than nonmusicians to perceive prosody, a central aspect of spoken language comprehension (Frazier, Carlson, & Clifton, 2006). At the acoustic level, prosody is defined by four acoustic parameters: fundamental frequency (F0), duration, intensity, and spectral characteristics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Musicians Detect Pitch Violation in a Foreign Language Better Than Nonmusicians: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Marques

Moreno

Castro

et al. 2007

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

241

170

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Abstract& The aim of this study was to determine whether musical expertise influences the detection of pitch variations in a foreign language that participants did not understand. To this end, French adults, musicians and nonmusicians, were presented with sentences spoken in Portuguese. The final words of the sentences were prosodically congruous (spoken at normal pitch height) or incongruous (pitch was increased by 35% or 120%). Results showed that when the pitch deviations were small and difficult to detect (35%: weak prosodic incongruities), the level of performance was higher for musicians than for nonmusicians. Moreover, analysis of the time course of pitch processing, as revealed by the event-related brain potentials to the prosodically congruous and incongruous sentence-final words, showed that musicians were, on average, 300 msec faster than nonmusicians to categorize prosodically congruous and incongruous endings. These results are in line with previous ones showing that musical expertise, by increasing discrimination of pitch-a basic acoustic parameter equally important for music and speech prosody-does facilitate the processing of pitch variations not only in music but also in language.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musicians Detect Pitch Violation in a Foreign Language Better Than Nonmusicians: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Marques

Moreno

Castro

et al. 2007

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

241

170

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Moreover, ERP data have demonstrated that in adults prosodic information influences syntactic parsing very fast, that is in a very early phase during speech comprehension (Eckstein and Friederici, 2006) and that the brain's sensitivity to prosodic features is present not only in adults (Pannekamp et al, 2005), but also in infants (Pannekamp et al, 2006). Psycholinguistic studies in adults (Marslen-Wilson et al, 1992;Warren et al, 1995) have provided evidence for an interaction of prosodic and syntactic processes during auditory language comprehension (Frazier et al, 2006), and psycholinguistic models of language acquisition state a strong reliance on prosodic information during early language processing (Weissenborn and Höhle, 2001). The shorter right than left BOLD latencies for children in our study seem to match these electrophysiological data and, moreover, are consistent with the psycholinguistic models.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal dynamics of perisylvian activation during language processing in children and adults

2008

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The perisylvian region of the human cortex is known to play a major role in language processing. Especially the superior temporal cortex (STC) and the inferior frontal cortex (IFC) have been investigated with respect to their particular involvement in language comprehension. In the present research, the timing of recruitment of these language-related brain areas in both hemispheres was examined as a function of age using functional imaging data of 6-year-old children and adults with a special focus on blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response time courses. The results show that children's activation time courses differ from that of adults. First, children show an overall later peak of BOLD responses. Second, children's IFC responds much later than their STC, while in adults the difference between both regions is less pronounced. Within the STC, both groups show similar regionally U-shaped activation patterns with fastest peaks in voxels at the STC's mid-portion around Heschl's gyrus and longer latencies in anterior and posterior directions, suggesting a coarsely similar information flow in adults and children in the temporal region. Finally, children in contrast to adults, display a temporal primacy of right over left hemispheric activation. The observed overall latency differences between children and adults are in line with the assumption of ongoing maturation in perisylvian brain regions and the connections between them. A functional perspective on BOLD timing argues for a developmental change from higher processing costs in children compared to adults due to slower and less automatic language processes, in particular those located in the IFC. The observed hemispheric differences are discussed in the context of developmental models assuming a high reliance on right-hemisphere-based suprasegmental information processing during language comprehension in childhood.

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“…As corpus analyses of the 40 verbs revealed an overall bias toward transitive use, and because we were interested in structural parsing preferences, we used the verbs in progressive aspect ("is approaching") rather than present or past tense ("approaches"/"approached"). Progressive verb forms have previously been shown to reduce such a transitivity bias without abolishing the structural garden-path effects (Frazier, Carlson, & Clifton, 2006). The 80 sentences in Conditions A (LC) and B (EC) were recorded by a male English native speaker in a sound-attenuating booth (44.1 kHz sampling rate, 16-bit amplitude resolution [Marantz digital recorder PMD670]).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pauker¹,

Itzhak²,

Baum³

et al. 2011

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

141

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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. ■

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Prosodic phrasing is central to language comprehension

Cited by 347 publications

References 36 publications

Musicians Detect Pitch Violation in a Foreign Language Better Than Nonmusicians: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Musicians Detect Pitch Violation in a Foreign Language Better Than Nonmusicians: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

Temporal dynamics of perisylvian activation during language processing in children and adults

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

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