Kerkhofs Roel, Vonk Wietske, Schriefers Herbert, Chwilla Dorothee J
Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2007 Sep;19(9):1421-34. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2007.19.9.1421.
Speech is structured into parts by syntactic and prosodic breaks. In locally syntactic ambiguous sentences, the detection of a syntactic break necessarily follows detection of a corresponding prosodic break, making an investigation of the immediate interplay of syntactic and prosodic information impossible when studying sentences in isolation. This problem can be solved, however, by embedding sentences in a discourse context that induces the expectation of either the presence or the absence of a syntactic break right at a prosodic break. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were compared to acoustically identical sentences in these different contexts. We found in two experiments that the closure positive shift, an ERP component known to be elicited by prosodic breaks, was reduced in size when a prosodic break was aligned with a syntactic break. These results establish that the brain matches prosodic information against syntactic information immediately.
言语通过句法和韵律停顿被组织成不同部分。在局部句法歧义的句子中，句法停顿的检测必然要在相应韵律停顿被检测到之后，这使得在孤立研究句子时，对句法和韵律信息的直接相互作用进行研究变得不可能。然而，这个问题可以通过将句子嵌入到一个话语语境中来解决，该语境会在韵律停顿处引发对句法停顿存在或不存在的预期。在这些不同语境中，将事件相关电位（ERP）与声学上相同的句子进行了比较。我们在两项实验中发现，当韵律停顿与句法停顿对齐时，一种已知由韵律停顿引发的ERP成分——闭合正移，其幅度会减小。这些结果表明，大脑会立即将韵律信息与句法信息进行匹配。
