Overt and implicit prosody contribute to neurophysiological responses previously attributed to grammatical processing

Recent neurophysiological research suggests that slow cortical activity tracks hierarchical syntactic structure during online sentence processing. Here we tested an alternative hypothesis: electrophysiological activity peaks at constituent phrase as well as sentence frequencies reflect cortical tracking of overt or covert (implicit) prosodic grouping. Participants listened to series of sentences presented in three conditions while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. First, prosodic cues in the sentence materials were neutralized. We found an EEG spectral power peak elicited at a frequency that only ‘tagged’ covert, implicit prosodic change, but not any major syntactic constituents. In the second condition, participants listened to a series of sentences with overt prosodic grouping cues that either aligned or misaligned with the syntactic phrasing in the sentences (initial overt prosody trials). Following each overt prosody trial, participants were presented with a second series of sentences lacking overt prosodic cues (instructed prosody trial) and were instructed to imagine the prosodic contour present in the previous, overt prosody trial. The EEG responses reflected an interactive relationship between syntactic processing and prosodic tracking at the frequencies of syntactic constituents (sentences and phrases): alignment of syntax and prosody boosted EEG responses, whereas their misalignment had an opposite effect. This was true for both overt and imagined prosody conditions. We conclude that processing of both overt and covert prosody is reflected in the frequency-tagged neural responses at sentence constituent frequencies. These findings need to be incorporated in any account that aims to identify neural markers reflecting syntactic processing.