Prosodic processing at the sentence level in infants

We investigate whether 8-month-old infants can detect prosodic cues relevant in sentence structuring. We recorded event-related potentials to examine online responses to the processing of prosodic boundaries. Prior studies in adults have validated the closure positive shift as reflecting prosodic boundary perception during speech processing. The current study shows that in the event-related potentials of 8-month-olds, a closure positive shift is elicited in relation to the prosodic boundaries in speech, suggesting that these infants are able to structure speech input into prosodic units on a neurophysiological basis similar to that seen in adults. A delay in latency of the infant closure positive shift, however, suggests that children's exploitation of prosodic boundaries for the segmentation of the speech stream is still developing

Prosodische Informationsverarbeitung bei normalsprachlichem und deviantem Satzmaterial: Untersuchungen mit ereigniskorrelierten Hirnpotentialen

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht mit einem EKP-Paradigma die Verarbeitung prosodischer Phrasengrenzen bei normalsprachlichen und deviantem Stimulusmaterial. Ziel ist es, die prosodisch relatierte Komponente Closure Positive Shift (CPS), die das Schließen einer Phrasengrenze reflektiert, weiter zu etablieren. Darüber hinaus soll der Nachweis erbracht werden, dass ausschließlich prosodische Information notwendig zum Hervorrufen dieser Komponente ist

Prosody-driven sentence processing: An event-related brain potential study

Four experiments systematically investigating the brain's response to the perception of sentences containing differing amounts of linguistic information are presented. Spoken language generally provides various levels of information for the interpretation of the incoming speech stream. Here, we focus on the processing of prosodic phrasing, especially on its interplay with phonemic, semantic, and syntactic information. An event-related brain potential (ERP) paradigm was chosen to record the on-line responses to the processing of sentences containing major prosodic boundaries. For the perception of these prosodic boundaries, the so-called closure positive shift (CPS) has been manifested as a reliable and replicable ERP component. It has mainly been shown to correlate to major intonational phrasing in spoken language. However, to define this component as exclusively relying on the prosodic information in the speech stream, it is necessary to systematically reduce the linguistic content of the stimulus material. This was done by creating quasi-natural sentence material with decreasing semantic, syntactic, and phonemic information (i. e., jabberwocky sentences, in which all content words were replaced by meaningless words; pseudoword sentences, in which all function and all content words are replaced by meaningless words; and delexicalized sentences, hummed intonation contour of a sentence removing all segmental content). The finding that a CPS was identified in all sentence types in correlation to the perception of their major intonational boundaries clearly indicates that this effect is driven purely by prosody