Immediate integration of different types of prosodic information during on-line spoken language comprehension: an ERP study.

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate the role of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary as well as their interaction in spoken discourse comprehension. Chinese question-answer dialogues were used as stimuli. The answer sentence is a syntactically ambiguous phrase, with a prosodic phrase boundary at the immediate left side of the critical word in the carrier sentence. Meanwhile, the critical word was accented. We manipulated the question context while keeping the speech signal of the answer sentence constant, which gives rise to congruent and in-congruent question-answer pairs with violations of prosodic prominence, prosodic boundary, or both. Results showed that prosodic prominence violation evoked a frontal-central negative effect (270-510ms), while prosodic boundary violation elicited a broadly distributed negative effect (270-510ms and 510-660ms). The effect of combined prominence-boundary violation was similar to that of the single prosodic prominence violation. Furthermore, there was an interaction between the effect of prosodic prominence violation and the effect of prosodic boundary violation in the window latency of 270-510ms, which suggests an immediate interaction between the semantic processing of prosodic prominence and the syntactic processing of prosodic boundary during spoken language comprehension. In addition, a detailed analysis of the obtained negativity effects showed that the size of the negative effect to the prosodic boundary violation was increased by an additional prosodic prominence violation, but the size of the negative effect to the prosodic prominence violation was not affected by an additional prosodic boundary violation, which suggests an asymmetry between the effects of prosodic prominence and prosodic boundary.