title: Inadequate and infrequent are not alike: ERPs to deviant prosodic patterns in spoken sentence comprehension.
abstract: The current study on German investigates Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) for the perception of sentences with intonations which are infrequent (i.e. vocatives) or inadequate in daily conversation. These ERPs are compared to the processing correlates for sentences in which the syntax-to-prosody relations are congruent and used frequently during communication. Results show that perceiving an adequate but infrequent prosodic structure does not result in the same brain responses as encountering an inadequate prosodic pattern. While an early negative-going ERP followed by an N400 were observed for both the infrequent and the inadequate syntax-to-prosody association, only the inadequate intonation also elicits a P600.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Germany.
authors.forename: Anja
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mietz
authors.forename: Ulrike
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Toepel
authors.forename: Anja
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ischebeck
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Alter
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001931:Brain Mapping; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*