Elsevier

Cognitive Brain Research

Volume 20, Issue 3, August 2004, Pages 427-437
Cognitive Brain Research

Research report
Processing of affective prosody and lexical-semantics in spoken utterances as differentiated by event-related potentials

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2004.03.015Get rights and content

Abstract

In the current study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were utilized to assess whether ERP correlates would distinguish between prosodic and lexical-semantic information processed during the comprehension of a spoken affective message. To this end, we employed a standard oddball paradigm with stimuli varying in lexical-semantic or prosodic characteristics. An N400 component was obtained in response to all stimuli and conditions (non-targets and targets). Greater negativity in the N400 amplitude was observed in response to semantic as compared to prosodic stimuli. An anterior (P3a) positive component was increased for prosodic as compared to semantic targets. We also investigated whether an N400 and/or P3a component would be present when a stimulus carried affective semantic and affective prosodic information. The ERP structure observed in response to targets of this condition showed a reduction in the amplitude of the N400 component and an explicit anterior P3a component, significantly greater than the P3a component in response to prosodic or semantic targets. Finally, a P3b component was evoked in response to targets, regardless of communicative dimension.

Section snippets

Participants

Fourteen right-handed female undergraduate university students were asked to participate in this experiment for extra points of credit as part of their required undergraduate program. The age range fell between 19 and 40 years of age (mean=25.7, S.D.=5.8). All participants were native speakers of American English. Hearing status was determined for each ear through audiometric screening procedures. Only participants with normal hearing at octave intervals between 500 and 4000 Hz (threshold ≤25

Behavioral results

The accuracy scores gathered during experimental testing indicated that the participants could accurately identify the stimuli across conditions and types. All participants obtained an accuracy score of 88% or higher across all conditions. A repeated-measures ANOVA evaluating the accuracy scores for each stimulus condition (non-targets and targets) across stimulus types (prosody, semantics, bi-dimensional) resulted in a main effect of stimulus type (F(2,26)=8.256, p=0.002) and stimulus

Discussion

A variety of cues are extracted from a set of communicative dimensions in order to comprehend spoken messages. The majority of research has chosen one communicative dimension to study rather than investigating how and when prompts of various communicative dimensions are used and how they interact. Specific brain potentials indicating the immediate use of linguistic prosodic cues to solve syntactic ambiguities in natural speech processing have been reported [64] but such explorations cannot be

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