Oscillatory Brain Responses Reflect Anticipation during Comprehension of Speech Acts in Spoken Dialog.

ABSTRACT: Everyday conversation requires listeners to quickly recognize verbal actions, so-called speech acts, from the underspecified linguistic code and prepare a relevant response within the tight time constraints of turn-taking. The goal of this study was to determine the time-course of speech act recognition by investigating oscillatory EEG activity during comprehension of spoken dialog. Participants listened to short, spoken dialogs with target utterances that delivered three distinct speech acts (Answers, Declinations, Pre-offers). The targets were identical across conditions at lexico-syntactic and phonetic/prosodic levels but differed in the pragmatic interpretation of the speech act performed. Speech act comprehension was associated with reduced power in the alpha/beta bands just prior to

SUBMITTER: Gisladottir RS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5808328 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature