title: Stem Tones Pre-activate Suffixes in the Brain.
abstract: Results from the present event-related potentials (ERP) study show that tones on Swedish word stems can rapidly pre-activate upcoming suffixes, even when the word stem does not carry any lexical meaning. Results also show that listeners are able to rapidly restore suffixes which are replaced with a cough. Accuracy in restoring suffixes correlated positively with the amplitude of an anterior negative ERP elicited by stem tones. This effect is proposed to reflect suffix pre-activation. Suffixes that were cued by an incorrect tone elicited a left-anterior negativity and a P600, suggesting that the correct processing of the suffix is crucially tied to the activation of the preceding validly associated tone.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, 221 00, Lund, Sweden. pelle.soderstrom@ling.lu.se.
authors.forename: Pelle
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Söderström
authors.affiliation: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, 221 00, Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Merle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Horne
authors.affiliation: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Box 201, 221 00, Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Mikael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Roll
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: ERP; Morphology; Pre-activation; Prosody; Speech processing