Brain potentials indicate immediate use of prosodic cues in natural speech
processing
Karsten Steinhauer, Kai Alter
& Angela D. Friederici
Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute of Cognitive
Neuroscience, PO Box 500 355, D−04303 Leipzig
, Germany
Correspondence should be addressed to Karsten Steinhauer steinhau@cns.mpg.de
Spoken language, in contrast to written text, provides prosodic information
such as rhythm, pauses, accents, amplitude and pitch variations. However,
little is known about when and how these features are used by the listener
to interpret the speech signal. Here we use event−related brain potentials
(ERP) to demonstrate that intonational phrasing guides the initial analysis
of sentence structure. Our finding of a positive shift in the ERP at intonational
phrase boundaries suggests a specific on−line brain response to prosodic
processing. Additional ERP components indicate that a false prosodic boundary
is sufficient to mislead the listener's sentence processor. Thus, the application
of ERP measures is a promising approach for revealing the time course and
neural basis of prosodic information processing.
