Abstract
AbstractProsodic breaks (PBs) can indicate a sentence’s syntactic structure. Event‐related brain potentials (ERPs) are an excellent way to study auditory sentence processing, since they provide an on‐line measure across a complete sentence, in contrast to other on‐ and off‐line methods. ERPs for the first time allowed investigating the processing of a PB itself. PBs reliably elicit a closure positive shift (CPS). We first review several studies on the CPS, leading to the conclusion that it is elicited by abstract structuring or phrasing of the input. Then we review ERP findings concerning the role of PBs in sentence processing as indicated by ERP components like the N400, P600 and LAN. We focus on whether and how PBs can (help to) disambiguate locally ambiguous sentences. Differences in results between different studies can be related to differences in items, initial parsing preferences and tasks. Finally, directions for future research are discussed.
Highlights
A spoken utterance is not just a string of words, but always comes with a certain intonation (‘melody’), rhythm, intensity and timing
We focus on prosodic breaks (PBs) in sentence comprehension
We will start by briefly discussing how the role of PBs in sentence comprehension has been investigated in the past and why event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are especially useful to study this topic
Summary
A spoken utterance is not just a string of words, but always comes with a certain intonation (‘melody’), rhythm, intensity and timing. We focus on prosodic breaks (PBs) in sentence comprehension. A PB, referred to as prosodic boundary or intonational phrase boundary, consists of one or more of the following elements: a pause in a sentence, a boundary tone preceding this pause and the lengthening of the word before the pause We will start by briefly discussing how the role of PBs in sentence comprehension has been investigated in the past and why event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are especially useful to study this topic. We will turn to ERP research on PBs in sentences. This research for the first time allowed studying the role of PBs in sentence comprehension, and the processing of a PB itself. A 2011 The Authors Language and Linguistics Compass a 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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