State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 4A Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, China.
Biol Psychol. 2010 Mar;83(3):250-9. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.01.009. Epub 2010 Jan 18.
In the present study, the ERP (event-related brain potentials) technique was used to investigate how and when prosodic boundaries interact with ongoing discourse context during on-line syntactic processing and especially the precise time characteristics of this prosodic boundaries effect. Chinese question-answer dialogues were used as stimuli. The answers were syntactically ambiguous phrases, the meaning of which could be biased via changing the preceding question context or the prosodic boundaries in the carrier sentence. The results revealed that, first, presence of prosodic boundaries, relative to absence of these boundaries, evoked a P2 effect. Second and importantly, there was an immediate interaction between discourse context and prosodic boundaries. When the prosodic boundaries were inconsistent with the syntactic interpretation built upon the ongoing discourse context, a left-anterior distributed LAN effect or a combined LAN and N400 effect was elicited (time-locked to the critical words at the immediate right side of prosodic boundaries). The results indicated that prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing and can be immediately integrated with the ongoing discourse context during spoken discourse comprehension. In addition, the LAN effect elicited by prosodic boundaries violation indicated that prosodic information may affect the initial incorporation of a word into the syntactic structure in speech processing.
在本研究中，采用事件相关电位（ERP）技术来探讨韵律边界在在线句法加工中是如何以及何时与正在进行的话语语境相互作用的，特别是韵律边界效应的精确时间特征。我们使用中文问答对话作为刺激。回答是句法上模棱两可的短语，通过改变前面的问题语境或载体句中的韵律边界，可以使这些短语的意思偏向于某种解读。结果表明：首先，与不存在韵律边界相比，存在韵律边界会引起 P2 效应。其次，也是重要的一点，话语语境和韵律边界之间存在即时的相互作用。当韵律边界与基于正在进行的话语语境建立的句法解读不一致时，会引发左前分布的 LAN 效应或 LAN 和 N400 效应的组合（与韵律边界右侧的关键词时间锁定）。结果表明，韵律边界可用于指导句法分析，并可在口语理解过程中立即与正在进行的话语语境整合。此外，韵律边界违反引起的 LAN 效应表明，韵律信息可能会影响词在语音处理中初始纳入句法结构的方式。
