Poster A45, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:15 am – 12:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Clause-type prediction and detection based on prosody: Earlier than you thought
Yang Yang1, Leticia Pablos2,3, Stella Gryllia2, Niels Schiller2,3, Lisa Cheng2,3;1Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, 2Leiden University Center for Linguistics, 3Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition
[INTRODUCTION] Clause-type (wh-question or declarative) has been shown to be prosodically marked in Mandarin and listeners can identify clause-type based on prosody. Nevertheless, how early prosody plays a role in clause-type detection and prediction is barely known. We fill this gap by conducting an auditory ERP study on Mandarin wh-questions, their string-identical wh-declaratives (declaratives containing wh-words), preceded by contexts biasing wh-questions or wh-declaratives. We chose this paradigm for these reasons: 1) Mandarin wh-questions and wh-declaratives offer a good test case for prosody’s role on clause-types, as Mandarin is not only a wh-in-situ language where wh-words remain at their base positions but also a wh-indeterminate language where the same wh-word such as shénme can have both interrogative (‘what’) and non-interrogative interpretations (‘something’). 2) Our behavioral studies show that wh-questions and wh-declaratives are marked by different prosody starting from subject (the first word of sentence) and therefore the predicted clause-types based on context and the unpredicted target clause-types marked by prosody should give rise to clear incongruities of clause-types for listeners. [PRESENT STUDY] An ERP study was conducted with 24 Mandarin native speakers listening to sentences preceded by contexts (2-3 sentences) that bias towards either wh-questions or wh-declaratives. The contexts in each set are only different at the final sentence (i.e., ‘XX asked:’ biases towards a question versus ‘This is something XX is sure of:’ biases towards a declarative). By combining contexts and target sentences, we obtain four conditions in each set: (a) Declarative-biased context, wh-declarative prosody (subject-adverb-verb-diǎnr-shénme-prepositional phrase) (D-D in short). (b) Wh-question-biased context, wh-question prosody (sub.-adv.-verb-diǎnr-shénme-pp) (Q-Q). (c) Declarative-biased context, wh-question prosody (D-Q). (d) Wh-question-biased context, wh-declarative prosody (Q-D). By comparing context-target incongruent condition (c) with (a) and incongruent condition (d) with (b), at one or more critical words (time-locked to subject, verb and shénme), we expect to find clause type prediction and detection effects such as negativities (Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2013), or the unexpectedness or integration difficulty related effects like N400 or P600 effects. [RESULTS & DISCUSSION] Opting for a non-biased analysis, omnibus ANOVAs were performed repeatedly using sliding 100ms long windows to localize potential effects with respect to the onset time of all critical words respectively. Results showed that when comparing (c) (D-Q) with (a) (D-D), at subject position, (c) elicited negativities in the 300-400ms time-window in the left and middle hemisphere. The 300-400ms left-lateralized negativities can be interpreted as an early detection that the prosody of the subject is not the predicted one based on context, indicating the early and essential role of prosody for clause-typing. It is of interest that we did not find any significant differences in the critical regions thereafter (verb, shénme), perhaps due to the fact that as speech unfolds, the incongruent clause-type becomes sort of “expected” or “familiar”. Also, we did not find significant differences between (d) (Q-D) with (b), indicating an asymmetry in accommodating different clause-types.
Themes: Prosody, Perception: Auditory
Method: Electrophysiology (MEG/EEG/ECOG)