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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.
Perceptual attunement to one's native language results in language-specific processing of speech sounds. This includes stress cues, instantiated by differences in intensity, pitch, and duration. The present study investigates the effects of linguistic experience on the perception of these cues by studying the Iambic-Trochaic Law (ITL), which states that listeners group sounds trochaically (strong-weak) if the sounds vary in loudness or pitch and iambically (weak-strong) if they vary in duration. Participants were native listeners either of French or German; this comparison was chosen because French adults have been shown to be less sensitive than speakers of German and other languages to word-level stress, which is communicated by variation in cues such as intensity, fundamental frequency (F0), or duration. In experiment 1, participants listened to sequences of co-articulated syllables varying in either intensity or duration. The German participants were more consistent in their grouping than the French for both cues. Experiment 2 was identical to experiment 1 except that intensity variation was replaced by pitch variation. German participants again showed more consistency for both cues, and French participants showed especially inconsistent grouping for the pitch-varied sequences. These experiments show that the perception of linguistic rhythm is strongly influenced by linguistic experience.
Previous research has shown that high phonotactic frequencies
facilitate the production of regularly inflected verbs in English-learning
children with specific language impairment (SLI) but not with typical
development (TD). We asked whether this finding can be replicated
for German, a language with a much more complex inflectional
verb paradigm than English. Using an elicitation task, the production
of inflected nonce verb forms (3 rd person singular with -t suffix)
with either high- or low-frequency subsyllables was tested in
sixteen German-learning children with SLI (ages 4;1–5 ;1), sixteen
TD-children matched for chronological age (CA) and fourteen TD-
children matched for verbal age (VA) (ages 3;0–3 ;11). The findings
revealed that children with SLI, but not CA- or VA-children, showed
differential performance between the two types of verbs, producing
more inflectional errors when the verb forms resulted in low-frequency
subsyllables than when they resulted in high-frequency subsyllables,
replicating the results from English-learning children.