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SUMMARY:Speech segmentation: On the processing of accents and boundaries -
  Kai Alter\, University of Newcastle\, Institute of Neuroscience
DTSTART:20100309T160000Z
DTEND:20100309T173000Z
UID:TALK22003@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Chris Cummins
DESCRIPTION:Spoken language generally provides various levels of informati
 on for the interpretation of the incoming speech stream. Moreover\, speech
  contains specific prosodic cues to indicate the presence of intonational 
 phrase boundaries (IPB).\n\nIt has been shown that IPBs elicit a specific 
 component in Auditory Evoked Potentials\, the so-called closure-positive-s
 hift (CPS\; see Steinhauer\, Alter & Friederici 1999\, Pannekamp et al 200
 5). In this talk\, I would like to discuss this issue in studies investiga
 ting brain responses to IPBs and accents. \n\n*Investigations of IPBs*\n\n
 Four experiments systematically investigating the brain's response to the 
 perception of sentences containing differing amounts of linguistic informa
 tion will be presented. The focus is on the processing of IPBs with respec
 t to syntactic\, semantic\, and phonemic information. Quasi-natural senten
 ce material with decreasing semantic\, syntactic\, and phonemic informatio
 n was created (i. e.\, jabberwocky sentences\, in which all content words 
 were replaced by meaningless words\; pseudoword sentences\, in which all f
 unction and all content words are replaced by meaningless words\; and humm
 ed sentences). \n\n\nIn this series of ERP investigations\, the on-line br
 ain responses to the processing of sentences containing a different number
  of IPBs (Pannekamp et al 2005) were recorded. It can be shown that the CP
 S relies primarily on prosodic information in the speech stream.\n\n*Inves
 tigations of accents*\n \n\nIn a follow-up study ERP correlates for the pr
 ocessing of focal accents and their compatibility relative to a context qu
 estion (information structure) has been investigated. ERP data suggest tha
 t in compatible answers\, lexical elements carrying the respective accent 
 elicit a centro-parietal positivity. The ERP patterns for incompatible ans
 wers appear to be more complex. Depending on both the type of violation an
 d the position in the sentence we observed either a negative slow wave or 
 a biphasic sequence of components. The nature of the ERPs will be discusse
 d in the context of prosodic processing models taking into account the par
 ticular role of information structure in every-day conversation (Toepel et
  al 2007). \n
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
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