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The Parallel Function of Common and Prosodic Boundary : Evidence from Chinese
Poster Session B, Friday, September 12, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Field House
Ji Gina Jinxin1, Tao Ran1, Tian Yujia1, Peng Gang1; 1Hong Kong Polytechnic University
The study investigated the brain mechanisms underlying sentence segmentation in both visual and speech modalities, examining whether the two modalities serve parallel functions. Previous studies have shown that the Closure Positive Shift (CPS), an event-related potential (ERP) component, occurs during prosodic boundary perception in speech and during sentence segmentation in reading. Although this component has been explored in German and Dutch, no direct evidence has been found in studies using natural sentences. Steinhauer and Friederici (2001) used sentences with comma errors, and Kerkhofs et al. (2008) observed CPS effects only in the auditory modality. Previous studies showed that the results were also heavily influenced by participants’ awareness of commas. This study focused on Chinese, a language that may provide novel insights due to its unique syntactic structures and higher awareness of comma usage because of the absence of word spacing in written Chinese. Twenty-four native Mandarin speakers participated in the experiment, aged between 18 and 30. The material included 120 unambiguous sentences, disambiguated either by a prosodic boundary in the auditory modality or by a comma in the reading modality (e.g., 小明找不到爸爸，妈妈很着急 [Xiaoming couldn’t find his dad, and his mom was very anxious] and 小明找不到爸爸妈妈，很着急 [Xiaoming couldn’t find his dad and mom, and he was very anxious]), along with 120 filler sentences. In the reading task, sentences were presented using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm, with the comma shown together with the critical word (e.g., [爸爸，father]). Each word was displayed for 500 ms, followed by a 400 ms blank interval before the next word appeared. In the listening task, participants listened to each full sentence. After each sentence in both tasks, participants answered comprehension questions to assess their understanding of sentence structure and meaning. Each task lasted approximately 40 minutes, and the order of tasks was counterbalanced across participants. Epochs were extracted from 200 ms before to 1000 ms after the onset of the critical stimuli, which included the comma-carrying words in the reading task (e.g., [爸爸，father]) and the prosodic boundary (e.g., pauses) in the listening task. The time window for the visual task was set from 300 ms to 400 ms, and for the auditory task, it was from 350 ms to 600 ms, based on previous studies. Preliminary analyses revealed that both visual and auditory conditions elicited the CPS component, though its amplitude was significantly larger in the auditory modality than in the visual modality. These results supported the implicit prosody hypothesis showing that implicit prosody triggered during reading served a similar function to explicit prosodic boundaries in auditory processing. The smaller CPS amplitude in the visual modality suggested that implicit prosody may be less pronounced or salient than explicit prosodic boundaries in the auditory condition. References: Steinhauer, K., & Friederici, A. D. (2001). Prosodic boundaries, comma rules, and brain responses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30, 267–295. Kerkhofs, R., Vonk, W., Schriefers, H., & Chwilla, J. (2008). Sentence processing in the visual and auditory modality: Do comma and prosodic break have parallel functions? Brain Research, 1224.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration