Poster E19

Closure Positive Shifts (CPS) : evoked by prosodic rhythm-groups in meaningful and meaningless speech

Annie C. Gilbert¹, Boutheina Jemel¹, Victor J. Boucher¹;¹Université de Montréal

The speech stream can bear two types of prosodic marks: language specific and structural. The latter marks, which are associated with rhythm and intonation groups (RGs and IGs), are universal and occur spontaneously during oral recall. Using Event Related Potentials (ERPs), IGs have been found to evoke a “closure positive shift” (CPS) (Steinhauer et al. 1999, Pannekamp et al. 2005). The present study adopts the view that CPS reflects instead the effects of RGs and captures the online segmentation of speech. We conducted two experiments using 100 meaningful utterances (Experiment 1) and 100 meaningless series of syllables (Experiment 2) where 2 RGs of varying length (3-4 syllables) were inserted within an IG. ERPs were averaged with respect to RGs. The averaged potentials show that the CPS is specifically evoked by RGs in both experiments, confirming that these potentials link to prosody and not to semantic or syntactic units. The results also bear implications with regard to an on-line segmentation of speech based on RGs, a principle that conforms to grouping effects on the recall of verbal series (Boucher 2006) and the hypothesis of a limited focus of attention (Cowan 2000).

Keywords: Primary = LANGUAGE: Other; Secondary = ATTENTION: Auditory

 
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