Signal-Driven And Expectation-Driven Processing Of Accent Types

This paper investigates neurophysiological correlates of prosodic prominence in German with two EEG experiments. Experiment 1 tested different degrees of prominence (three accent types: L+H*, H*, H+L* and deaccentuation) in the absence of context, making the acoustic signal the only source for attention orienting. Experiment 2 tested L+H* and H+L* accents in relation to contexts such as "Guess what happened today" triggering expectations as to how exciting the following utterance will be. Results reveal that prominence cues that attract attention, such as a signal-driven high level of prosodic prominence or a content-driven expression of excitement, engender positivities of varying latency. Furthermore, contextual expectations trigger prediction errors, e.g. deviations from an appropriate level of prosodic prominence result in a negative ERP deflection. Hence, the data suggest that the two core processes - attentional orientation and predictive processing - reflect discrete stages in the construction of a mental representation during real-time comprehension.