title: Prosodic expectations in silent reading: ERP evidence from rhyme scheme and semantic congruence in classic Chinese poems.
abstract: In an ERP study, classic Chinese poems with a well-known rhyme scheme were used to generate an expectation of a rhyme in the absence of an expectation for a specific character. Critical characters were either consistent or inconsistent with the expected rhyme scheme and semantically congruent or incongruent with the content of the poem. These stimuli allowed us to examine whether a top-down rhyme scheme expectation would affect relatively early components of the ERP associated with character-to-sound mapping (P200) and lexically-mediated semantic processing (N400). The ERP data revealed that rhyme scheme congruence, but not semantic congruence modulated the P200: rhyme-incongruent characters elicited a P200 effect across the head demonstrating that top-down expectations influence early phonological coding of the character before lexical-semantic processing. Rhyme scheme incongruence also produced a right-lateralized N400-like effect. Moreover, compared to semantically congruous poems, semantically incongruous poems produced a larger N400 response only when the character was consistent with the expected rhyme scheme. The results suggest that top-down prosodic expectations can modulate early phonological processing in visual word recognition, indicating that prosodic expectations might play an important role in silent reading. They also suggest that semantic processing is influenced by general knowledge of text genre.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, China; Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, NY, USA. Electronic address: jscqr80@sina.com.
authors.forename: Qingrong
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Electronic address: Zhangjingjing@psych.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Jingjing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: School of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, China.
authors.forename: Xiaodong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Scheepers
authors.affiliation: School of Linguistic Sciences, Jiangsu Normal University, China. Electronic address: yangym@jsnu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yiming
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, NY, USA. Electronic address: mtan@mail.bcs.rochester.edu.
authors.forename: Michael K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Tanenhaus
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: N400; N400-like; P200; Poem; Prosody; Rhyme scheme; Semantics