Word accents and phonological neighbourhood as predictive cues in spoken language comprehension
نویسندگان
چکیده
The present contribution summarises event-related potential (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings related to the processing of Swedish word accents in speech comprehension. It has previously been seen that word accents – either a low tone (accent 1) or a high tone (accent 2) on a word stem – can be used to pre-activate suffixes. Furthermore, it has been found that accent 1 seems to be a stronger “predictor” of upcoming suffixes as compared to accent 2. It has been proposed that accent 1 stems give rise to a pre-activation negativity (PRAN) brain potential, which is related to their high predictive weight as regards associated suffixes. We suggest that the processing differences between accent 1 and 2 stems can partly be explained by the difference in the number of word activations elicited by accent 1 and accent 2 word stems. This idea is tested by means of a regression analysis, which found that word stems in denser phonological neighbourhoods – i.e. which occur in more lexical items – elicit smaller PRAN effects. The results point to the importance of word accents in Swedish word comprehension.
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