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Suprasegmental cues modulate lexical access: ERPs from North Germanic varieties
Poster C34 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Anna Hjortdal1, Johan Frid2, Mikael Novén3, Mikael Roll1; 1Centre for languages and literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 2Lund University Humanities Lab, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 3Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Most models of spoken word recognition assume that lexical access is an interplay between forward and backward-looking processes. Listeners probabilistically activate a cohort of possible lexical candidates which is incrementally reorganised as the signal unfolds. Neurophysiological correlates of both types of processes have been identified within 500 ms after the onset of the relevant phonemes (for a review, see Gwilliams & Davis, 2022). Suprasegmental cues such as tone and voice quality can provide lexical and morphological information in an additional dimension on top of unfolding segments. We reanalysed ERPs from three North Germanic language varieties to investigate the influence of suprasegmental cues on spoken word recognition, Central Swedish, South Swedish and Danish. All three language varieties have a two-way word accent distinction. The accents have a similar distribution but are realised differently across varieties. For instance, accent 1 is realised as a low tone on the stressed syllable in Central Swedish, a pitch fall in South Swedish and as a type of creaky voice in Standard Copenhagen Danish. We used combined pronunciation lexica and frequency lists to calculate estimates of lexical uncertainty and information gain at suprasegmental cue onset. Participants listened to target words incorporated into low-constraining carrier sentences. Using single-trial mixed-effects regression models run every 4 ms, we investigated temporally fine-grained event-related potential effects of lexical uncertainty and information gain associated with suprasegments. Only forward-looking processes showed solid results: Lexical uncertainty, operationalized as cohort entropy, correlated positively with ERPs at frontal sites within 200 ms after suprasegmental cue onset and negatively at posterior sites after 200 ms. The findings are in line with a previously reported frontal pre-activation negativity (PrAN) for more constraining phonological cues (Roll et al., 2015). Backward-looking information gain associated with the onset of suprasegmental cues resulted in effects with similar polarities and latencies, but these did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. The findings indicate that the PrAN effect is driven by forward-looking processes – perhaps due to task demands. The weaker effect of information gain could also be due to task demands or because measuring points were late in words. While a model including only segmental information mostly performed better, it was outperformed by the suprasegmental model from 200-330 ms at frontal sites. This indicates that in this time window, suprasegmental cues contribute to lexical access over and beyond segments in the North Germanic varieties investigated. This points to a spoken word recognition system making use of any available information, including prosodic, to access relevant lexical candidates (Marslen-Wilson, 1987). In addition to being lexically distinctive, North Germanic word accents are associated with morphological structure and specific word endings (Rischel, 1963). Swedish listeners can use the accents to activate suffixes even when stems do not carry lexical meaning (Söderström et al., 2017). Therefore, it is possible that the word accent effect reflects not only expectations about the lexical identity of unfolding words but also about their morphological structure.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Speech Perception