The where and when of linguistic word-level prosody.
Despite its presence in all natural languages prosodic processing remains under-researched in cognitive science. Hemispheric specialisation for linguistic word-level prosody, specifically, sensitivity to stress typicality was examined using dichotic listening. In Experiment 1, participants named targets and in Experiment 2 participants classified targets as nouns or verbs. In both studies stress typicality effects emerged in the left hemisphere only. These results suggest that: (1) the left hemisphere may be responsible for conveying accurate stress patterns prior to lexical access, (2) supra-segmental information reduces the set of potential candidates during lexical access, and (3) prosody and grammatical category interact in the language processing system.
Arciuli
Joanne
J
Department of Psychology, Charles Sturt University, Panorama Avenue, Bathurst 2795, Australia. jarciuli@csu.edu.au
Slowiaczek
Louisa M
LM
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*