Does the prosodic emphasis of sentential context cause deeper lexical-semantic processing?

ABSTRACT

Speakers use prosodic emphasis to express the content of their message in order to help listeners to infer meaning. By measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) to semantically congruent and incongruent final words embedded in a sentential context that was emphasised or de-emphasised, we investigated whether prosodic emphasis conveyed by a sentential context leads listeners to a finer semantic analysis. The negative shift (N400) triggered by the difficulty to combine the incongruent word with the sentence representation was increased by prosodic emphasis at an early stage. Over the later stages, the amplitude of the N400 wave was increased by prosodic emphasis of the sentential context, whatever the semantic congruency of final words. As shown by the N400 wave, emphasising a sentential context affected the lexical-semantic processing of the following word. This study provides clear evidence that prosodic emphasis plays a role in the semantic analysis of sentences by inducing a deeper analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Prosodic emphasis
• sentential context
• spoken-word recognition
• lexical recognition memory
• event-related potentials

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a visual studies grant (SCV2013-2014), from the French National Research Agency (ANR-11-EQPX-0023), and was also funded by European funds through the FEDER SCV-IrDIVE programme. We are very grateful to Adèle Delalleau and Ondine Strachowski for their help in selecting the stimuli and running the experiment. ERP analyses were performed with the Cartool software provided by the Center for Biomedical Imaging in Geneva and Lausanne. The manuscript was proofread by a native English-speaking copyeditor. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The early N400 resembles in timing the Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN) traditionally occurring between 270 and 310 ms (see Steinhauer & Connolly, 2008). It has been suggested that this component indexes a phonological stage of word processing that serves to map phonological code in the activation of a lexical cohort of candidates. However, the latter component can be also found during the processing of pseudowords and words. We cannot rule out the emergence of PMN or an overlapping between the N400 and the PMN between 260 and 360 ms. We called the component observed over this time window the early N400, because the strongest semantic congruency effects were observed over centroparietal sites, as usually described in the N400 literature.

2 Supplementary analyses based on frontocentral or left anterior sites separately did not reveal any significant interaction between prosodic emphasis and semantic congruency.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European funds through FEDER SCV-IrDIVE program; French National Research Agency [grant number ANR-11-EQPX-0023].