Romero-Rivas Carlos, Martin Clara D, Costa Albert
Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Carrer de Tànger, 122, 08018 Barcelona, Spain.
BCBL. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain; IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain.
Neuropsychologia. 2016 May;85:245-55. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.03.022. Epub 2016 Mar 25.
Listeners are able to anticipate upcoming words during sentence comprehension, and, as a result, they also pre-activate semantically related words. In the present study, we aim at exploring whether these anticipatory processes are modulated by indexical properties of the speakers, such as a speaker's accent. Event-related brain potentials were obtained while native speakers of Spanish listened to native (Experiment 1) or foreign-accented speakers (Experiment 2) of Spanish producing highly constrained sentences. The sentences ended in: (1) the highest cloze probability completion, (2) a word semantically related to the expected ending, or (3) a word with no semantic overlap with the expected ending. In Experiment 1, we observed smaller N400 mean amplitudes for the semantically related words as compared to the words with no semantic overlap, replicating previous findings. In Experiment 2, we observed no difference in integrating semantically related and unrelated words when listening to accented speech. These results suggest that linguistic anticipatory processes are affected by indexical properties of the speakers, such as the speaker's accent.
在句子理解过程中，听众能够预测即将出现的单词，因此，他们也会预先激活语义相关的单词。在本研究中，我们旨在探究这些预测过程是否会受到说话者的指示性特征（如说话者的口音）的调节。当以西班牙语为母语的人听以西班牙语为母语的人（实验1）或带有外国口音的西班牙语使用者（实验2）说出高度受限的句子时，记录与事件相关的脑电活动。这些句子的结尾为：（1）填空概率最高的完成形式，（2）与预期结尾语义相关的单词，或（3）与预期结尾没有语义重叠的单词。在实验1中，与没有语义重叠的单词相比，我们观察到语义相关单词的N400平均波幅更小，这重复了先前的研究结果。在实验2中，当听有口音的语音时，我们观察到在整合语义相关和不相关单词方面没有差异。这些结果表明，语言预测过程会受到说话者的指示性特征（如说话者的口音）的影响。
