Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Lexical stress precedes syllable structure during speech planning – evidence from EEG-MVPA
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Constantijn L van der Burght1,4, Giulia Li Calzi2, Antje S Meyer1,3; 1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2University of Zurich, 3Radboud University, 4Leiden University
To produce a word, speakers need to decide which concept to express, select an appropriate item from the mental lexicon, and spell out its phonological form. The temporal dynamics of these processes remain a subject of debate. Concerning the phonological phase, (psycho)linguistic theories have long argued whether a word’s stress pattern is retrieved independently, or whether this information is derived from a word’s syllable structure. To address this issue, we investigated the time course of lexical access in picture naming with electroencephalography (EEG). Native speakers of Dutch (N=30; 23 female; age 23.4 ± 4.2 years) named 48 pictures using simple nouns. The picture names varied in semantic category (animate or inanimate), stress pattern (first or second syllable), and the structure of the first syllable (open or closed). We analysed the EEG data using time-resolved multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), which quantifies the extent and time course in which neural representations support the discrimination of relevant stimuli dimensions. Using time-resolved MVPA, we decoded the availability of semantic category, stress pattern, and syllable structure during speech preparation. An additional, exploratory analysis was performed on the availability of the word-initial phoneme (plosive vs. fricative). The results demonstrated above-chance decoding of semantic category within 100 ms after picture onset, confirming early access to semantic information. This was followed by stress pattern and syllable structure, at around 150 and 250 ms after picture onset, respectively. These results suggest that a word’s stress pattern can be retrieved before syllable structure information becomes available. The exploratory analysis demonstrated the availability of the word-initial phoneme within 100 ms after picture onset. This result, while not part of the a-priori analysis plan, tentatively supports the view that during picture naming semantic and phonological information are accessed rapidly and in parallel. In sum, our results offer novel insights for theories of language production, suggesting that the retrieval of lexical stress is independent from syllable structure. Importantly, this study demonstrates the successful application of MVPA on pre-articulation data from EEG, a widely available method, offering an accessible approach to address novel questions in speech production research.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Phonology