Phonological markers of information structure: An fMRI study

NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA

卷:58

Article

van Leeuwen, Tessa M.¹  Lamers, Monique J. A.^2,3  Petersson, Karl Magnus^1,4  Gussenhoven, Carlos⁵  Rietveld, Toni⁵  Poser, Benedikt^1,6  Hagoort, Peter^1,4 

[1] Radboud Univ Nijmegen, Donders Inst Brain Cognit & Behav, NL-6500 HB Nijmegen, Netherlands

[2] Vrije Univ Amsterdam, Dept Language & Commun, Amsterdam, Netherlands

[3] Eargroup, B-2100 Antwerp, Belgium

[4] Max Planck Inst Psycholinguist, Nijmegen, Netherlands

[5] Radboud Univ Nijmegen, Dept Linguist, NL-6500 HB Nijmegen, Netherlands

[6] Univ Duisburg Essen, Erwin L Hahn Inst Magnet Resonance Imaging, Essen, Germany

关键词: Pitch accent;    Language comprehension;    Left inferior frontal gyrus;    Unification;    Focus accent;    Reversed speech;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.03.017

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

In this fMRI study we investigate the neural correlates of information structure integration during sentence comprehension in Dutch. We looked into how prosodic cues (pitch accents) that signal the information status of constituents to the listener (new information) are combined with other types of information during the unification process. The difficulty of unifying the prosodic cues into overall sentence meaning was manipulated by constructing sentences in which the pitch accent did (focus-accent agreement), and sentences in which the pitch accent did not (focus-accent disagreement) match the expectations for focus constituents of the sentence. In case of a mismatch, the load on unification processes increases. Our results show two anatomically distinct effects of focus-accent disagreement, one located in the posterior left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA6/44), and one in the more anterior-ventral LIFG (BA 47/45). Our results confirm that information structure is taken into account during unification, and imply an important role for the LIFG in unification processes, in line with previous fMRI studies. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

Free