Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T09:23:29.843Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2015

Mikael Roll
Mikael Roll*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Box 201, S-221 00 Lund, Sweden. mikael.roll@ling.lu.se
Get access

Abstract

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’).

Keywords

brain potentialsEEGERPlexical tonemorphologySouth Swedishword accents
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 38 , Special Issue 2: Prosody in the Nordic Languages , October 2015 , pp. 149 - 162
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bruce, Gösta. 1973. Tonal accent rules for compound stressed words in the Malmö dialect. Working Papers, Phonetics Laboratory (Lund University) 7, 1–35.Google Scholar
Bruce, Gösta. 1976. Svenska accenter i ett satsperspektiv. Nysvenska studier 55/56, 120–132.Google Scholar
Bruce, Gösta. 1977. Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective. Lund: Gleerups.Google Scholar
Cutler, Anne, Dahan, Delphine & van Donselaar, Wilma. 1997. Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: A literature review. Language and Speech 40 (2), 141–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dale, Anders Martin. 1999. Optimal experimental design for event-related fMRI. Human Brain Mapping 8, 109–114.3.0.CO;2-W>CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Felder, Verena, Jönsson-Steiner, Elisabet & Eulitz, Carsten. 2009. Asymmetric processing of lexical tonal contrast in Swedish. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71 (8), 1890–1899.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frid, Johan. 2000. Compound accent patterns in some dialects of Southern Swedish. Fonetik 2000, 61–64.Google Scholar
Jung, Tzyy-Ping, Makeig, Scott, Humphries, Colin, Lee, Te-Won, McKeown, Martin James, Iragui, Vicente & Sejnowski, Terrence Joseph. 2000. Removing electroencephalographic artifacts by blind source separation. Psychophysiology 37, 163–178.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koester, Dirk & Schiller, Niels Olaf. 2011. The functional neuroanatomy of morphology in language production. NeuroImage 55, 732–741.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Näätänen, Risto. 1992. Attention and Brain Function. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Nilsson, Jan, Panizza, Marcela & Hallett, Mark. 1993. Principles of digital sampling of a physiologic signal. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 89, 349–358.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Riad, Tomas. 1998. The origin of Scandinavian tone accents. Diachronica 15 (1), 63–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riad, Tomas. 2014. The Phonology of Swedish. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rischel, J. 1963. Morphemic tone and word tone in Eastern Norwegian. Phonetica 10, 154–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roll, Mikael. 2015. ERP – exploring the temporal microstructure of cognitive functions in the brain. In Horne, Merle, Lindgren, Magnus, Nilsson, Markus, Roll, Mikael, Shtyrov, Yury, Ståhlberg, Freddy & Topgaard, Daniel (eds.), Microstructures of Learning, 25–28. Lausanne: Frontiers Media SA.Google Scholar
Roll, Mikael & Horne, Merle. 2011. Interaction of right- and left-edge prosodic boundaries in syntactic parsing. Brain Research 1402, 93–100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roll, Mikael, Horne, Merle & Lindgren, Magnus. 2010. Word accents and morphology – ERPs of Swedish word processing. Brain Research 1330, 114–123.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roll, Mikael, Horne, Merle & Lindgren, Magnus. 2011. Activating without inhibiting: Left-edge boundary tones and syntactic processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23 (5), 1170–1179.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roll, Mikael, Söderström, Pelle & Horne, Merle. 2013. Word-stem tones cue suffixes in the brain. Brain Research 1520, 116–120.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roll, Mikael, Söderström, Pelle, Mannfolk, Peter, Shtyrov, Yury, Johansson, Mikael, van Westen, Danielle & Horne, Merle. In press. Word tones cueing morphosyntactic structure: Neuroanatomical substrates and activation time course assessed by EEG-fMRI. Brain and Language.Google Scholar
Söderström, Pelle, Horne, Merle & Roll, Mikael. 2015. Stem tones preactivate suffixes in the brain. Ms., Lund University.Google Scholar
Söderström, Pelle, Roll, Mikael & Horne, Merle. 2012. Processing morphologically conditioned word accents. The Mental Lexicon 7 (1), 77–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, Lorraine K., Marslen-Wilson, William D. & Stamatakis, Emmanuel A.. 2005. Differentiating lexical form, meaning and structure in the neural language system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102, 8375–8380.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed