Abstract
Rhythm affects the speech perception of events unfolding over time. However, it is not clear to what extent the rhythm could affect the processes of sentence speech production. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, we examined whether a particular rhythmic pattern could affect the planning of speech production before articulation. We recorded electrophysiological (EEG) and behavioural (reaction time) data while participants read aloud a target speech in Chinese. Target speeches were sentences or phrases consisting four characters, with regular (e.g., the 2 + 2 pattern; numbers in the brackets represent the number of syllables) or irregular (e.g., 1 + 3) rhythmic patterns, which were preceded by congruent or incongruent musical rhythmic patterns formed by simple pure tones with different temporal intervals. Behavioural and ERP findings indicated a rhythmic priming effect in comparing congruent and incongruent conditions in the regular target speeches, but not in the irregular ones. An early component (N100) that was elicited in response to target speeches that were rhythmically mismatched to primes was linked to the detection of hierarchical linguistic units, which did not conform to expectations. A later negative component (N400) was thought to reflect the violation of expectation on rhythmic pattern in speech production. These findings suggest that rhythmic pattern constrains grammatical and prosodic encoding during speech production, and support the hypothesis that speakers form a grammatical or a prosodic abstract frame before articulation.
Highlights
Spoken sentence production is the process of generating a series of words in the correct sequence through grammatical and prosodic encoding
A musical-like rhythmic prime was used to elicit expectations about the whole rhythmic pattern of the target speech
Behavioural results showed a rhythmic priming effect, which presented with faster reading latencies in the congruent prime and target pattern conditions than in the incongruent conditions, but only for the 2 + 2 speech rhythmic pattern, and not for the 1 + 3 speech rhythmic pattern
Summary
Spoken sentence production is the process of generating a series of words in the correct sequence through grammatical and prosodic encoding. The second part occurs at the positional level, where the phonological representations of words are inserted into a planning frame that fixes their locations in a string. Little is known about how prosody affects the planning process of spoken sentence production. A number of studies have demonstrated the interaction among syntax, semantics, and phonology in process of language comprehension. A number of studies have demonstrated the interaction among syntax, semantics, and phonology in process of language comprehension16,17 Whether this conclusion can be extended to language production is not known. A priming task has been discussed as a method for investigating representations and encoding of different linguistic levels in language comprehension and production. Studies on syntactic priming have found that speakers prefer to use recently processed syntactic structures when describing a scenario or an event. We aim to investigate whether the rhythmic pattern affects the planning of speech production before articulation
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