The neural processing of pitch accents in continuous speech.
Neuropsychologia
; 158: 107883, 2021 07 30.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33989647
ABSTRACT
Pitch accents are local pitch patterns that convey differences in word prominence and modulate the information structure of the discourse. Despite the importance to discourse in languages like English, neural processing of pitch accents remains understudied. The current study investigates the neural processing of pitch accents by native and non-native English speakers while they are listening to or ignoring 45 min of continuous, natural speech. Leveraging an approach used to study phonemes in natural speech, we analyzed thousands of electroencephalography (EEG) segments time-locked to pitch accents in a prosodic transcription. The optimal neural discrimination between pitch accent categories emerged at latencies between 100 and 200 ms. During these latencies, we found a strong structural alignment between neural and phonetic representations of pitch accent categories. In the same latencies, native listeners exhibited more robust processing of pitch accent contrasts than non-native listeners. However, these group differences attenuated when the speech signal was ignored. We can reliably capture the neural processing of discrete and contrastive pitch accent categories in continuous speech. Our analytic approach also captures how language-specific knowledge and selective attention influences the neural processing of pitch accent categories.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Speech
/
Speech Perception
Limits:
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Neuropsychologia
Year:
2021
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
United States