Overt and implicit prosody contribute to neurophysiological responses previously attributed to grammatical processing.

ABSTRACT: Recent neurophysiological research suggests that slow cortical activity tracks hierarchical syntactic structure during online sentence processing. Here we tested an alternative hypothesis: electrophysiological activity peaks at constituent phrase as well as sentence frequencies reflect cortical tracking of overt or covert (implicit) prosodic grouping. Participants listened to series of sentences presented in three conditions while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. First, prosodic cues in the sentence materials were neutralized. We found an EEG spectral power peak elicited at a frequency that only 'tagged' covert, implicit prosodic change, but not any major syntactic constituents. In the second condition, participants listened to a series of sentences with overt prosodic grouping c

SUBMITTER: Glushko A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9427746 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature