TY  - JOUR
A1  - Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia
A1  - Wellmann, Caroline
A1  - Petrone, Caterina
A1  - Truckenbrodt, Hubert
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - Brain response to prosodic boundary cues depends on boundary position
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Prosodic information is crucial for spoken language comprehension and especially for syntactic parsing, because prosodic cues guide the hearer's syntactic analysis. The time course and mechanisms of this interplay of prosody and syntax are not yet well-understood. In particular, there is an ongoing debate whether local prosodic cues are taken into account automatically or whether they are processed in relation to the global prosodic context in which they appear. The present study explores whether the perception of a prosodic boundary is affected by its position within an utterance. In an event-related potential (PRP) study we tested if the brain response evoked by the prosodic boundary differs when the boundary occurs early in a list of three names connected by conjunctions (i.e., after the first name) as compared to later in the utterance (i.e., after the second name). A closure positive shift (CPS)-marking the processing of a prosodic phrase boundary-was elicited for stimuli with a late boundary, but not for stimuli with an early boundary. This result is further evidence for an immediate integration of prosodic information into the parsing of an utterance. In addition, it shows that the processing of prosodic boundary cues depends on the previously processed information from the preceding prosodic context.
KW  - prosodic boundaries
KW  - event-related potentials
KW  - closure positive shift
KW  - speech perception
KW  - prosody
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00421
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 4
IS  - 28
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia
A1  - Wellmann, Caroline
A1  - Petrone, Caterina
A1  - Raeling, Romy
A1  - Truckenbrodt, Hubert
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - How pitch change and final lengthening cue boundary perception in German: converging evidence from ERPs and prosodic judgements
JF  - Language, cognition and neuroscience
N2  - This study examines the role of pitch and final lengthening in German intonation phrase boundary (IPB) perception. Since a prosody-related event-related potential (ERP) component termed Closure Positive Shift reflects the processing of major prosodic boundaries, we combined ERP and behavioural measures (i.e. a prosodic judgement task) to systematically test the impact of sole and combined cue occurrences on IPB perception. In two experiments we investigated whether adult listeners perceived an IPB in acoustically manipulated speech material that contained none, one, or two of the prosodic boundary cues. Both ERP and behavioural results suggest that pitch and final lengthening cues have to occur in combination to trigger IPB perception. Hence, the combination of behavioural and electrophysiological measures provides a comprehensive insight into prosodic boundary cue perception in German and leads to an argument in favour of interrelated cues from the frequency (i.e. pitch change) and the time (i.e. final lengthening) domain.
KW  - Speech perception
KW  - prosody
KW  - Event-Related Potential (ERP) technique
KW  - Closure Positive Shift (CPS)
KW  - prosodic boundary cues
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1157195
SN  - 2327-3798
SN  - 2327-3801
VL  - 31
SP  - 904
EP  - 920
PB  - Begell House
CY  - Abingdon
ER  -