Isel Frédéric, Alter Kai, Friederici Angela D
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2005 Jan;17(1):154-67. doi: 10.1162/0898929052880075.
Spoken language comprehension involves the use of different sources of linguistic information such as prosodic, syntactic, lexical, and semantic information. The question, however, of ''when'' and ''how'' these sources of information are exploited by the language processing system still remains unanswered. In the present study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the interaction between prosodic, syntactic, and lexical information during the processing of spoken German sentences. The sentence structure was manipulated by positioning a split particle at the end of the sentences after the occurrence of inflected verb whose lexical entry does not contain a split particle (e.g., *Sie alarmierte den Detektiv an [*She alerted at the detective]) [According to linguistic convention, incorrect sentences are marked by an asterisk.]. The prosodic contour of the verb stems was manipulated such that it marked either the presence of a split particle at a later position in the sentence or not. Participants performed an off-line probe-detection task. ERP data indicate that prosodic information of German-inflected verb stems is consulted on-line by the language processing system (''parser'') in order to ''predict'' the presence of a split particle at a later position in the sentence. An N400 effect was observed for the processing of split particles following verb stems which do not take a particle. However, this effect was only observed when the prosody of the verb stem did signal the presence of a split particle. We argue that the N400 component reflects the high costs associated with the lexical search that the language processing system has to perform when confronted with nonexisting words such as these resulting from the combination of the split particle and the verb stem in the present study. Furthermore, as a general reflection of prosodic processes, a Closure Positive Shift (CPS) was found at intonational phrase boundaries. In sum, the present findings provide strong evidence that prosodic information is a good ''predictor'' of upcoming information during the auditory processing of German sentences.
口语理解涉及使用不同的语言信息源，如韵律、句法、词汇和语义信息。然而，语言处理系统“何时”以及“如何”利用这些信息源的问题仍然没有答案。在本研究中，我们使用事件相关脑电位（ERP）来研究德语口语句子处理过程中韵律、句法和词汇信息之间的相互作用。句子结构通过在屈折动词出现后将分裂词置于句子末尾来操纵，该动词的词汇项中不包含分裂词（例如，*Sie alarmierte den Detektiv an [*她向侦探发出警报]）[根据语言惯例，不正确的句子用星号标记。]。动词词干的韵律轮廓被操纵，使其要么标记句子中后面位置存在分裂词，要么不标记。参与者执行离线探测检测任务。ERP数据表明，语言处理系统（“解析器”）在线查询德语屈折动词词干的韵律信息，以便“预测”句子中后面位置是否存在分裂词。对于不带有分裂词的动词词干之后的分裂词处理，观察到了N400效应。然而，只有当动词词干的韵律确实表明存在分裂词时，才会观察到这种效应。我们认为，N400成分反映了语言处理系统在面对本研究中由分裂词和动词词干组合产生的不存在单词时必须进行词汇搜索所带来的高成本。此外，作为韵律过程的一般反映，在语调短语边界处发现了闭合正移（CPS）。总之，本研究结果提供了有力证据，表明韵律信息是德语句子听觉处理过程中即将出现信息的良好“预测指标”。
