title: Elicitation of N400m in sentence comprehension due to lexical prosody incongruity.
abstract: The role of lexical prosody in the semantic integration of spoken sentences consisting of a quiz stem and an answer word was investigated analyzing the event-related magnetic response, N400m. Three conditions regarding the relations between the quiz and the answer word were prepared: pitch-accent violation, phonemic violation and no violation. Both the pitch-accent and phonemic violations elicited significant N400m without any significant differences in the peak latency and magnitude of the equivalent current dipoles, suggesting that the role of pitch-accent in semantic integration is equivalent to that of phonemes. However, the rate of violation detection and the successful N400m source estimation were lower for the pitch-accent violation than for the phonemic violation, suggesting differential neural processes for the phonemic and prosodic cues.
authors.affiliation: Research Institute of National Rehabilitation Center for the Disabled, Saitama, Japan.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hayashi
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Imaizumi
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mori
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Niimi
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ueno
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kiritani
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D015225:Magnetoencephalography; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*