Elicitation of N400m in sentence comprehension due to lexical prosody incongruity.
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.
Hayashi
R
R
Research Institute of National Rehabilitation Center for the Disabled, Saitama, Japan.
Imaizumi
S
S
Mori
K
K
Niimi
S
S
Ueno
S
S
Kiritani
S
S
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*