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Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence

In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that...

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Autores principales: Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula, Schmidt-Kassow, Maren, Kotz, Sonja A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3568096/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23409109
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056000
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author Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula
Schmidt-Kassow, Maren
Kotz, Sonja A.
author_facet Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula
Schmidt-Kassow, Maren
Kotz, Sonja A.
author_sort Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula
collection PubMed
description In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a constant metric pattern of three unstressed syllables between two stressed ones that created rhythmic groups of constant size. Accuracy rates in a comprehension task revealed that participants understood rhythmically regular sentences better than rhythmically irregular ones. Furthermore, the mean amplitude of the P600 component was reduced in response to object-first sentences only when embedded in rhythmically regular but not rhythmically irregular context. This P600 reduction indicates facilitated processing of sentence structure possibly due to a decrease in processing costs for the less-preferred structure (object-first). Our data suggest an early and continuous use of rhythm by the syntactic parser and support language processing models assuming an interactive and incremental use of linguistic information during language processing.
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spelling pubmed-35680962013-02-13 Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula Schmidt-Kassow, Maren Kotz, Sonja A. PLoS One Research Article In the current event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated how speech rhythm impacts speech segmentation and facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities in auditory sentence processing. Participants listened to syntactically ambiguous German subject- and object-first sentences that were spoken with either regular or irregular speech rhythm. Rhythmicity was established by a constant metric pattern of three unstressed syllables between two stressed ones that created rhythmic groups of constant size. Accuracy rates in a comprehension task revealed that participants understood rhythmically regular sentences better than rhythmically irregular ones. Furthermore, the mean amplitude of the P600 component was reduced in response to object-first sentences only when embedded in rhythmically regular but not rhythmically irregular context. This P600 reduction indicates facilitated processing of sentence structure possibly due to a decrease in processing costs for the less-preferred structure (object-first). Our data suggest an early and continuous use of rhythm by the syntactic parser and support language processing models assuming an interactive and incremental use of linguistic information during language processing. Public Library of Science 2013-02-08 /pmc/articles/PMC3568096/ /pubmed/23409109 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056000 Text en © 2013 Roncaglia-Denissen et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Roncaglia-Denissen, Maria Paula
Schmidt-Kassow, Maren
Kotz, Sonja A.
Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence
title Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence
title_full Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence
title_fullStr Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence
title_full_unstemmed Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence
title_short Speech Rhythm Facilitates Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution: ERP Evidence
title_sort speech rhythm facilitates syntactic ambiguity resolution: erp evidence
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3568096/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23409109
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056000
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