(De-)Accentuation and the Processing of Information Status: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials
(De-)Accentuation and the Processing of Information Status: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials
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DOI：
10.1177/0023830911422184
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发表时间：
2012-09-01
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Schumacher, Petra B.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Baumann, Stefan;Schumacher, Petra B.
该论文报道了一项德语感知实验，该实验利用事件相关大脑电位（ERP）研究信息结构概念的神经认知处理及其韵律标记。实验条件控制指称和非指称目标表达（名词与形容词）的信息状态（给定与新），并通过上下文句子引出，与该领域大多数先前的 ERP 研究不同，这不会触发明确的焦点期望。目标话语显示了关键词的韵律实现，其重音位置和重音类型有所不同。电生理学结果显示信息状态的影响，最大程度地分布在后部部位，显示新信息的双相 N400 - 晚期阳性模式。我们声称这种模式反映了与新信息相关的处理需求的增加，N400 表明将信息与先前的话语链接起来的成本增加，而晚期积极性表明听众为更新他/她的话语模型所做的努力。韵律操纵对前部区域产生了更明显的影响，并揭示了消极性的增强，随后是减弱的后期积极性，这可能也分别反映了话语链接和更新的成本。这些数据进一步间接支持了这样的观点：给定性不仅适用于所指对象，而且也适用于非指称表达（“词汇给定性”）。
The paper reports on a perception experiment in German that investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of information structural concepts and their prosodic marking using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Experimental conditions controlled the information status (given vs. new) of referring and non-referring target expressions (nouns vs. adjectives) and were elicited via context sentences, which did not - unlike most previous ERP studies in the field - trigger an explicit focus expectation. Target utterances displayed prosodic realizations of the critical words which differed in accent position and accent type. Electrophysiological results showed an effect of information status, maximally distributed over posterior sites, displaying a biphasic N400 - Late Positivity pattern for new information. We claim that this pattern reflects increased processing demands associated with new information, with the N400 indicating enhanced costs from linking information with the previous discourse and the Late Positivity indicating the listener's effort to update his/her discourse model. The prosodic manipulation registered more pronounced effects over anterior regions and revealed an enhanced negativity followed by a Late Positivity for deaccentuation, probably also reflecting costs from discourse linking and updating respectively. The data further lend indirect support for the idea that givenness applies not only to referents but also to non-referential expressions ('lexical givenness').