Poster E11

Eye movement, and ERPs and Prosody

Shani H. Abada¹, John E. Drury¹, Karsten Steinhauer¹, Shari R. Baum¹;¹McGill University

The present study examined the neural correlates of semantic and prosodic processing in simple aurally presented phrases of conjoined nouns with one of two prosodic groupings (e.g., "bike # and dog and cup" versus "bike and dog # and cup). Phrases were presented concurrently with horizontal triples of pictures grouped in one of two ways (e.g., BIKE | DOG CUP vs. BIKE DOG | CUP). The visual and auditory stimuli were arranged in four conditions where the pictures either: (i) corresponded to phrases (match), (ii) differed in the phrase grouping depicted (prosodic mismatch), (iii) contained a word/picture mismatch on the second/middle noun (semantic mismatch), or (iv) differed in both phrase grouping and word/picture mismatch (double mismatch). We attempted to minimize contamination of the ERPs by horizontal eye-movements by instructing participants (N=20) to fixate in the center of the screen. Examination of HEOG signals demonstrated while some participants were able to perform the task in this way (the "non-movers", N=7), more than half (the "movers", N=13) were unable to inhibit horizontal eye-movements (first leftward, to the initial object, then steadily rightward as the auditory signal unfolded in time). In general, ERP data revealed that participants were sensitive to both prosody and semantics, as evidenced by N400 and P600 responses to both types of mismatches. However, only the ERP responses associated with prosodic mismatches, and not those driven by semantics, differed between the groups, suggesting that eye-movement behavior in this task systematically influences prosodic processing.

Keywords: Primary = LANGUAGE: Other; Secondary = LANGUAGE: Semantic

 
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