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A neurolinguistic study of South Swedish word accents : Electrical brain potentials in nouns and verbs

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Author

Summary, in English

The brain response to words with correct and incorrect word accent–suffix combinations in South Swedish was investigated using electroencephalography (EEG). Accent 1 yielded an increased brain response (‘preactivation negativity’) that has previously been interpreted as reflecting preactivation of suffixes. Preactivation is greater for accent 1 due to its association with a limited set of suffixes, whereas accent 2 is default for compound words. The tonal realization of the word accent opposition in South Swedish is practically the mirror image of that in Central Swedish, where a similar preactivation negativity has been found. Therefore, the brain response is unlikely to result from a difference in acoustic features between the word accents. Invalidly cued suffixes yielded brain response pattern showing increased processing load of the unexpected suffix (negative electric potential) followed by its reprocessing (positivity ‘P600’).

Publishing year

2015

Language

English

Pages

149-162

Publication/Series

Nordic Journal of Linguistics

Volume

38

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics
  • Neurosciences

Status

Published

Project

  • Tone-Grammar Interaction in the Human Brain: Mechanisms and Applications
  • The language melody game (LMG): Learning Swedish word accents using IT and digital media
  • Images of tones: fMRI-studies on the processing of prosody in the human brain

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0332-5865