Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China.
Sci Rep. 2019 Sep 10;9(1):12974. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-49375-8.
Rhythm affects the speech perception of events unfolding over time. However, it is not clear to what extent the rhythm could affect the processes of sentence speech production. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, we examined whether a particular rhythmic pattern could affect the planning of speech production before articulation. We recorded electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural (reaction time) data while participants read aloud a target speech in Chinese. Target speeches were sentences or phrases consisting four characters, with regular (e.g., the 2 + 2 pattern; numbers in the brackets represent the number of syllables) or irregular (e.g., 1 + 3) rhythmic patterns, which were preceded by congruent or incongruent musical rhythmic patterns formed by simple pure tones with different temporal intervals. Behavioural and ERP findings indicated a rhythmic priming effect in comparing congruent and incongruent conditions in the regular target speeches, but not in the irregular ones. An early component (N100) that was elicited in response to target speeches that were rhythmically mismatched to primes was linked to the detection of hierarchical linguistic units, which did not conform to expectations. A later negative component (N400) was thought to reflect the violation of expectation on rhythmic pattern in speech production. These findings suggest that rhythmic pattern constrains grammatical and prosodic encoding during speech production, and support the hypothesis that speakers form a grammatical or a prosodic abstract frame before articulation.
节奏会影响对随时间展开的事件的言语感知。然而，节奏在何种程度上影响句子言语产生的过程尚不清楚。在这项事件相关电位（ERP）研究中，我们考察了特定的节奏模式是否会影响发音前言语产生的规划。我们记录了参与者用中文朗读目标语音时的电生理（EEG）和行为（反应时间）数据。目标语音由具有规则（例如，2+2 模式；括号中的数字表示音节数）或不规则（例如，1+3）节奏模式的四个字符的句子或短语组成，这些节奏模式之前是由具有不同时间间隔的简单纯音组成的一致或不一致的音乐节奏模式。行为和 ERP 发现表明，在比较规则目标语音中的一致和不一致条件时存在节奏启动效应，但在不规则目标语音中则没有。在与提示不匹配的节奏的目标语音中诱发的早期成分（N100）与检测不符合预期的层次语言单位有关。较晚的负成分（N400）被认为反映了在言语产生中对节奏模式的期望违反。这些发现表明，节奏模式在言语产生过程中限制了语法和韵律的编码，并支持了这样一种假设，即说话者在发音前形成了语法或韵律的抽象框架。
