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Abstract:
Abstract: In a recent study we demonstrated that prosodic
boundaries in natural speech are processed immediately by listeners
and guide further sentence analysis (Steinhauer, Alter, and
Friederici, 1999). The processing of such boundaries was reflected
in a large positive going ERP component, the closure positive shift
(CPS). Follow-up studies with written sentences revealed that
commas elicit a qualitatively similar positivity in the ERP,
suggesting that commas trigger similar prosodic processing
subvocally. The present ERP study both confirms and extends this
notion. Here, subjects first listened to a pure 'sentence melody'
that was stripped of any lexical information with a special
filtering procedure (PURR). Half of these prosodic patterns
contained an additional prosodic boundary. After a short pause
interval, subjects were instructed to replicate the previously
heard melody during the silent reading of a visually presented
(word-by-word) sentence. Although the written word sequence always
allowed this sentence melody mapping, the syntactic structure of
the sentence was either compatible or incompatible with the number
of prosodic boundaries. Both the prosodic boundaries in the pure
melody and the boundaries replicated during reading elicited
CPS-like positive ERP components which resembled those found for
comma perception. Thus, the CPS appears to be a universal on-line
reflection of both overt and covert phonological sentence phrasing
independent of the input modality.
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