Where Is the Beat? The Neural Correlates of Lexical Stress and Rhythmical Well-formedness in Auditory Story Comprehension.

While listening to continuous speech, humans process beat information to correctly identify word boundaries. The beats of language are stress patterns that are created by combining lexical (word-specific) stress patterns and the rhythm of a specific language. Sometimes, the lexical stress pattern needs to be altered to obey the rhythm of the language.

Structural Principles or Frequency of Use? An ERP Experiment on the Learnability of Consonant Clusters.

Phonological knowledge of a language involves knowledge about which segments can be combined under what conditions. Languages vary in the quantity and quality of licensed combinations, in particular sequences of consonants, with Polish being a language with a large inventory of such combinations. The present paper reports on a two-session experiment in which Polish-speaking adult participants learned nonce words with final consonant clusters.

Predicting "When" in Discourse Engages the Human Dorsal Auditory Stream: An fMRI Study Using Naturalistic Stories.

Unlabelled: The hierarchical organization of human cortical circuits integrates information across different timescales via temporal receptive windows, which increase in length from lower to higher levels of the cortical hierarchy (Hasson et al., 2015). A recent neurobiological model of higher-order language processing (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky et al.

Prosodic Parallelism-Comparing Spoken and Written Language.

The hypothesis claims adjacent prosodic categories to prefer identical branching of internal adjacent constituents. According to Wiese and Speyer (2015), this preference implies feet contained in the same phonological phrase to display either binary or unary branching, but not different types of branching. The seemingly free schwa-zero alternations at the end of some words in German make it possible to test this hypothesis.

Processing of false belief passages during natural story comprehension: An fMRI study.

The neural correlates of theory of mind (ToM) are typically studied using paradigms which require participants to draw explicit, task-related inferences (e.g., in the false belief task).

How information structure influences the processing of rhythmic irregularities: ERP evidence from German phrases.

This study explores the influence of focus and givenness on the cognitive processing of rhythmic irregularities occurring in natural speech. Previous ERP studies showed that even subtle rhythmic deviations are detected by the brain if attention is directed towards the rhythmic structure. By using question-answer pairs, it was investigated whether subtle rhythmic irregularities in form of stress clashes (two adjacent stressed syllables) and stress lapses (two adjacent unstressed syllables) are still perceived when presented in post-focus position in an answer sentence and attention is directed away from them, towards the meaning of the element in narrow focus position by the preceding wh-question.

The role of predictability and structure in word stress processing: an ERP study on Cairene Arabic and a cross-linguistic comparison.

This article presents neurolinguistic data on word stress perception in Cairene Arabic, in comparison to previous results on German and Turkish. The main goal is to investigate how central properties of stress systems such as predictability of stress and metrical structure are reflected in the prosodic processing of words. Cairene Arabic is a language with a regular foot-based word stress system, leading to highly predictable placement of word stress.

The relevance of rhythmical alternation in language processing: an ERP study on English compounds.

This study investigates the influence of rhythmic expectancies on language processing. It is assumed that language rhythm involves an alternation of strong and weak beats within a linguistic domain. Hence, in some contexts rhythmically induced stress shifts occur in order to comply with the Rhythm Rule.

Electrophysiological evidence for the continuous processing of linguistic categories of regular and irregular verb inflection in German.

A central question concerning word recognition is whether linguistic categories are processed in continuous or categorical ways, in particular, whether regular and irregular inflection is stored and processed by the same or by distinct systems. Here, we contribute to this issue by contrasting regular (regular stem, regular suffix) with semi-irregular (regular stem, irregular suffix) and irregular (irregular stem, irregular suffix) participle formation in a visual priming experiment on German verb inflection. We measured ERPs and RTs and manipulated the inflectional and meaning relatedness between primes and targets.

The influence of rhythmic (ir)regularities on speech processing: Evidence from an ERP study on German phrases.

The present study investigates the status of rhythmic irregularities occurring in natural speech and the importance of rhythmic alternations in cognitive processing. Previous studies showed the relevance of rhythm for language processing, but there has been only little research using the method of event-related potentials to investigate this phenomenon in a natural metrical context. To this end, an experiment was conducted in which the so-called Rhythm Rule (alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables) was either met or violated by stress clashes or stress lapses which are known to occur in German.

Stress "deafness" in a Language with Fixed Word Stress: An ERP Study on Polish.

The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g.

Where the mass counts: common cortical activation for different kinds of nonsingularity.

Typically, plural nouns are morphosyntactically marked for the number feature, whereas mass nouns are morphosyntactically singular. However, both plural count nouns and mass nouns can be semantically interpreted as nonsingular. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis that their commonality in semantic interpretation may lead to common cortical activation for these different kinds of nonsingularity.

Effects of ketamine-induced psychopathological symptoms on continuous overt rhyme fluency.

The N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) has been implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Administered to healthy individuals, a subanesthetic dose of the noncompetitive NMDAR antagonist ketamine reproduces several psychopathological symptoms commonly observed in patients with schizophrenia. In a counterbalanced, placebo-controlled, double-blind, within-participants study, fifteen healthy subjects were administered a continuous subanesthetic S-ketamine infusion while cortical activation was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The role of the posterior superior temporal sulcus in the processing of unmarked transitivity.

Is it living or not? The ability to differentiate between animate and inanimate entities is of considerable value in everyday life, since it allows for the dissociation of individuals that may willfully cause an action from objects that cannot. The present fMRI study aimed to shed light on the neural correlates of animacy at a relational-interpretive level, i.e.

Linguistic prominence and Broca's area: the influence of animacy as a linearization principle.

Previous neuroimaging findings suggest a sensitivity of the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (i.e. a core subregion of Broca's area) to a number of linguistic dependencies governing the linear sequencing of information in a sentence (e.

The emergence of the unmarked: a new perspective on the language-specific function of Broca's area.

A number of neuroimaging studies have implicated an involvement of Broca's area, particularly of the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), in the processing of complex (permuted) sentences. However, functional interpretations of this region's role range from very general (e.g.