The marked status of Accent 2 in Central Swedish

Based on results from psycholinguistic and neuro- linguistic research on the perception of word ac- cents in Central Swedish, we argue that Accent 2 could be seen as “marked,” as opposed to the un- marked Accent 1. The markedness of Accent 2 is assumed to be both phonetic, due to its relatively more complex high tone, and cognitive, due to the fact that the Accent 2 tone activates more word forms and thus increases processing load

Pre-activation negativity (PrAN) : A neural index of predictive strength of phonological cues

We propose that a recently discovered event-related potential (ERP) component—the pre-activation negativity (PrAN)—indexes the predictive strength of phonological cues, including segments, word tones, and sentence-level tones. Specifically, we argue that PrAN is a reflection of the brain’s anticipation of upcoming speech (segments, morphemes, words, and syntactic structures). Findings from a long series of neurolinguistic studies indicate that the effect can be divided into two time windows with different possible brain sources. Between 136 and 200 ms from stimulus onset, it indexes activity mainly in the primary and secondary auditory cortices, reflecting disinhibition of neurons sensitive to the expected acoustic signal, as indicated by the brain regions’ response to predictive certainty rather than sound salience. After ~200 ms, PrAN is related to activity in Broca’s area, possibly reflecting inhibition of irrelevant segments, morphemes, words, and syntactic structures

Anticipating morphological and syntactic structures : investigating the pre-activation negativity

It is known that listeners can predict upcoming words based on constraining contexts (e.g. DeLong et al., 2005). In a recent study, we proposed a left frontal brain potential, the pre-activation negativity, PrAN (Söderström et al., 2016), thought to reflect pre-activation of expected word continuations. Time-locked to word-initial fragments, PrAN’s amplitude was found to increase in a 136-280 ms time window as the number of possible continuations decreased, suggesting that PrAN increased with increased predictive certainty about a word’s ending. In the present study, we tested whether a similar effect could be found for pre-activation of expected syntactic structures. In Swedish, intonation is used to signal whether an unfolding embedded clause is a main or subordinate clause. Specifically, a clause-initial word with a low boundary tone cues only subordinate clause structure. Conversely, a corresponding high tone signals that any kind of embedded main clause structure may follow, i.e. it cues a more open set of structures. Test participants listened to complex sentences and judged the word order of the verb (V) and negation (NEG) after the boundary tone as quickly as possible (NEG–V word order occurs in subordinate clauses and V–NEG in main clauses). ERPs were time-locked to the tone-bearing syllable. A repeated-measures ANOVA showed a negativity in left anterior electrodes at 136-280 ms for low initial boundary tones, which cue only subordinate clauses. We propose that this effect is a PrAN, but that it here reflects pre-activation of syntactic structures rather than possible word endings

Word tones cueing morphosyntactic structure: Neuroanatomical substrates and activation time-course assessed by EEG and fMRI

AbstractPrevious studies distinguish between right hemisphere-dominant processing of prosodic/tonal information and left-hemispheric modulation of grammatical information as well as lexical tones. Swedish word accents offer a prime testing ground to better understand this division. Although similar to lexical tones, word accents are determined by words’ morphosyntactic structure, which enables listeners to use the tone at the beginning of a word to predict its grammatical ending. We recorded electrophysiological and hemodynamic brain responses to words where stem tones matched or mismatched inflectional suffixes. Tones produced brain potential effects after 136ms, correlating with subject variability in average BOLD in left primary auditory cortex, superior temporal gyrus, and inferior frontal gyrus. Invalidly cued suffixes activated the left inferior parietal lobe, arguably reflecting increased processing cost of their meaning. Thus, interaction of word accent tones with grammatical morphology yielded a rapid neural response correlating in subject variability with activations in predominantly left-hemispheric brain areas

Early neuroelectric signatures of spoken-word recognition: implications for studies of the phonology-grammar interface

Spoken language is a continuous signal, from which we must extract individual words to ultimately understand our interlocutor. In this process, lexical candidates compete for recognition within 200 milliseconds of the onset of a word. The neuroelectric correlates of this process have not been widely studied. In a recent electroencephalographic study on word recognition in English (Söderström & Cutler, under review), we replicated results from Swedish, where an early event-related potential starting at 150 milliseconds from word onset has been suggested to reflect the probabilistically driven activation of possible word forms and early lexical match, as well as the pre-activation of linguistic material based on phonological cues (Söderström et al., passim). These findings have implications for models of spoken-word recognition and – more generally – linguistic predictions, especially in the phonology-grammar interface, providing promising testing grounds for lexical processing in less-studied languages

Early ERP negativities in spoken-word recognition

When we listen to speech, lexical candidates compete for recognition within 200 milliseconds of the onset of a word. However, the neuroelectric correlates of this process have not been widely studied. In a recent electroencephalographic study on word recognition in English (Söderström & Cutler, under review), we replicated results from Swedish, where an early event-related potential starting at 150 milliseconds from word onset has been suggested to reflect the probabilistically driven activation of possible word forms and early lexical match, as well as the pre-activation of linguistic material based on phonological cues. These findings have implications for models of spoken-word recognition and – more generally – linguistic predictions, providing promising testing grounds for lexical processing in less-studied languages