Swift Prosodic Modulation of Lexical Access: Brain Potentials From Three North Germanic Language Varieties

What is it about?

Spoken language consists of a string of vowels and consonants unfolding over time. On top of those another strand of prosodic information such as stress, tone and voice quality fans out. In this study, we show that listeners use prosody to recognize words 200 ms after they become available to listeners. We calculated models of spoken word recognition from pronunciation lexica and frequency lists and correlated that with brain waves from 60 speakers of Danish and two Swedish varieties. By comparing models which included prosodic information with models which did not we could estimate when listeners used prosody from spoken word recognition.

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Photo by Josh Riemer on Unsplash

Photo by Josh Riemer on Unsplash