Work

Concurrent processing of the prosodic hierarchy is supported by cortical entrainment and phase-amplitude coupling

Year: 2024

Type: preprint

Abstract: Models of phonology posit a hierarchy of prosodic units that are relatively independent from syntactic structure, requiring its own parsing. Surprisingly, it remains unexplored how this prosodic hierarchy is represented in the brain. We investigated this foundational question by means of an EEG study. Thirty young adults listened to German sentences containing manipulations at different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Evaluating speech-to-brain cortical entrainment and phase-amplitude coupling revealed that prosody’s hierarchical structure is maintained at the neural level. The faithfulness of this tracking varied as a function of the hierarchy’s degree of intactness as well as systematic inter-individual differences in audio-motor synchronization. The results underscore the role of complex oscillatory mechanisms in configuring the continuous and hierarchical nature of the speech signal and firmly situate prosody as a structure indispensable from theoretical perspectives on spoken language comprehension in the brain.

Source: bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)

DOI: 10.1101/2024.01.22.576636

Authors: Chantal Oderbolz, Sebastian Sauppe, Martin Meyer

Institution: University of Zurich

Language: English

Topic: Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

Awards: NCCR Evolving Language: The Origins and Future of Language, The ontogeny and physiology of sentence planning