Effects of Structure and Meaning on Cortical Tracking of Linguistic Units in Naturalistic Speech.

ABSTRACT: Recent research has established that cortical activity "tracks" the presentation rate of syntactic phrases in continuous speech, even though phrases are abstract units that do not have direct correlates in the acoustic signal. We investigated whether cortical tracking of phrase structures is modulated by the extent to which these structures compositionally determine meaning. To this end, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) of 38 native speakers who listened to naturally spoken Dutch stimuli in different conditions, which parametrically modulated the degree to which syntactic structure and lexical semantics determine sentence meaning. Tracking was quantified through mutual information between the EEG data and either the speech envelopes or abstract annotations of syntax, all of which w

SUBMITTER: Coopmans CW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10158633 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature