Orthographic influences on spoken word recognition in bilinguals are dependent on the orthographic depth of the target language not the native language.

Reading acquisition leads to the restructuring of representational units in the brain, which influences spoken word processing. This makes spoken word recognition a bimodal process. However, the organization of phonological and orthographic units is dependent on the orthographic depth of the writing system and might play a role in the bimodal processing of spoken words. We investigated this question across two EEG experiments with German native speakers using an auditory priming paradigm and manipulating phonological (e.g., Reh - Tee) and orthographic (e.g., See - Tee) overlap between prime and target. Experiment 1 was conducted in German and revealed inhibitory effects for orthographic overlap, but facilitating effects for phonological overlap. Experiment 2 was conducted in English and revealed facilitating effects for orthographic and phonological overlap. We conclude that orthography influences spoken word processing in both languages, but the nature of the influence is dependent on the orthographic depth of the target language.

Information structure in language acquisition. Production and comprehension of (in)definite articles by German-speaking children.

The present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults. The results of a story-narration task and a truth-value judgment task reveal that children have more problems with new than with given referents in production as well as comprehension suggesting a "given better than new"-pattern. These findings are explained in the context of perspective-taking capacities and cue weighting theory.

Where Is the Beat? The Neural Correlates of Lexical Stress and Rhythmical Well-formedness in Auditory Story Comprehension.

While listening to continuous speech, humans process beat information to correctly identify word boundaries. The beats of language are stress patterns that are created by combining lexical (word-specific) stress patterns and the rhythm of a specific language. Sometimes, the lexical stress pattern needs to be altered to obey the rhythm of the language. This study investigated the interplay of lexical stress patterns and rhythmical well-formedness in natural speech with fMRI. Previous electrophysiological studies on cases in which a regular lexical stress pattern may be altered to obtain rhythmical well-formedness showed that even subtle rhythmic deviations are detected by the brain if attention is directed toward prosody. Here, we present a new approach to this phenomenon by having participants listen to contextually rich stories in the absence of a task targeting the manipulation. For the interaction of lexical stress and rhythmical well-formedness, we found one suprathreshold cluster localized between the cerebellum and the brain stem. For the main effect of lexical stress, we found higher BOLD responses to the retained lexical stress pattern in the bilateral SMA, bilateral postcentral gyrus, bilateral middle fontal gyrus, bilateral inferior and right superior parietal lobule, and right precuneus. These results support the view that lexical stress is processed as part of a sensorimotor network of speech comprehension. Moreover, our results connect beat processing in language to domain-independent timing perception.

Past participle formation in specific language impairment.

BACKGROUND: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix ge-). Findings reported in the literature are inconsistent on this point. In particular, it is unclear whether participle formation is vulnerable in German children with specific language impairment (SLI). AIMS: To compare children with and without SLI in their abilities to form German participles correctly, and to determine their relative sensitivities to the morphophonological regularities of prefixation. METHODS & PROCEDURES: The performance of 14 German-speaking children with SLI (mean age = 7;5) in a participle formation task was compared with that of age-matched and younger typically developing controls. The materials included 60 regular verbs and 20 pseudo-verbs, half of them requiring the prefix ge-. OUTCOME & RESULTS: Overall, children with SLI performed poorly compared with both groups of typically developing children. Children with SLI tended either to avoid participle markings or choose inappropriate affixes. However, while such children showed marked impairment at the morphological level, they were generally successful in applying the morphoprosodic rules governing prefixation. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: In contrast to earlier findings, the present results demonstrate that regular participle formation is problematic for German children with SLI.

Mental representations of vowel features asymmetrically modulate activity in superior temporal sulcus.

Research in auditory neuroscience illustrated the importance of superior temporal sulcus (STS) for speech sound processing. However, evidence for abstract processing beyond the level of phonetics in STS has remained elusive. In this study, we follow an underspecification approach according to which the phonological representation of vowels is based on the presence vs. absence of abstract features. We hypothesized that phonological mismatch in a same/different task is governed by underspecification: A less specified vowel in second position of same/different minimal pairs (e.g. [e]) compared to its more specified counterpart in first position (e.g. [o]) should result in stronger activation in STS than in the reverse presentation. Whole-brain analyses confirmed this hypothesis in a bilateral cluster in STS. However, this effect interacted with the feature-distance between first and second vowel and was most pronounced for a minimal, one-feature distance, evidencing the benefit of phonological information for processing acoustically minimal sound differences.

Bono Bo and Fla Mingo: Reflections of Speech Prosody in German Second Graders' Writing to Dictation.

Written German is characterized by an underrepresentation of prosody. During writing acquisition, children have to tackle the question which prosodic features are realized by what means - if any. We examined traces of speech prosody in German children's writing to dictation. A sample of 79 second graders were asked to write down eight sentences to dictation. We analyzed three potential reflections of speech prosody in children's dictations: (a) Merging of preposition and definite article, potentially preferred after monosyllabic prepositions as in this case preposition and article may melt to the canonical trochaic foot in German. (b) The introduction of orthographically inadequate graphemic border markings within trisyllabic animal names, respecting borders of prosodic units like foot or syllable. (c) Omissions of the definite article in non-optimal prosodic positions, deviating from the preferred strong-weak rhythm. The occurrence of border markings was evaluated via graded perceptual judgments. We found no evidence for inter-word border markings being influenced by prosodic context, probably due to a ceiling effect. However, word-internal markings within animal names, although rarely occurring in general, were clearly influenced by prosodic structure: Most of them were produced at borders of feet or syllables, while significantly fewer markings were perceived at borders of syllable constituents or within consonant clusters. Moreover, we observed significantly more omissions of the definite article in non-optimal prosodic positions compared to potentially optimal positions. Thus, our results provide first evidence from writing acquisition for prosodic influences on writing in a language with scarce graphemic marking of prosody.

How information structure influences the processing of rhythmic irregularities: ERP evidence from German phrases.

This study explores the influence of focus and givenness on the cognitive processing of rhythmic irregularities occurring in natural speech. Previous ERP studies showed that even subtle rhythmic deviations are detected by the brain if attention is directed towards the rhythmic structure. By using question-answer pairs, it was investigated whether subtle rhythmic irregularities in form of stress clashes (two adjacent stressed syllables) and stress lapses (two adjacent unstressed syllables) are still perceived when presented in post-focus position in an answer sentence and attention is directed away from them, towards the meaning of the element in narrow focus position by the preceding wh-question. Moreover, by visually presenting the lexical-semantic input of the deviating structure in the question, the influence of rhythmical and lexical properties in these two forms of rhythmic deviations are disentangled. While words in the present stress clash condition do not deviate from lexical stress, stress lapses contain deviations from metrical and lexical stress. The data reveal an early negativity effect for stress clashes but not for stress lapses, supporting the assumption that they are processed differently. The absence of a negative component for stress lapses indicates that the metrical deviation alone is not salient enough to be registered in non-focus position. Moreover, the lack of a late positive component suggests that subtle rhythmic deviations are less perceivable and hence more acceptable when presented in non-focus position. Thus, these results show that attentional shift induced by information structure influences the degree of the processing of rhythm.

The role of predictability and structure in word stress processing: an ERP study on Cairene Arabic and a cross-linguistic comparison.

This article presents neurolinguistic data on word stress perception in Cairene Arabic, in comparison to previous results on German and Turkish. The main goal is to investigate how central properties of stress systems such as predictability of stress and metrical structure are reflected in the prosodic processing of words. Cairene Arabic is a language with a regular foot-based word stress system, leading to highly predictable placement of word stress. An ERP study on Cairene Arabic is reported, in which a stress violation paradigm is used to investigate the factors predictability of stress and foot structure. The results of the experiment show that for Cairene Arabic the internal structure of prosodic words in terms of feet determines prosodic processing. This structure effect is complemented by a frequency effect for stress patterns.

The relevance of rhythmical alternation in language processing: an ERP study on English compounds.

This study investigates the influence of rhythmic expectancies on language processing. It is assumed that language rhythm involves an alternation of strong and weak beats within a linguistic domain. Hence, in some contexts rhythmically induced stress shifts occur in order to comply with the Rhythm Rule. In English, this rule operates to prevent clashes of stressed adjacent syllables or lapses of adjacent unstressed syllables. While previous studies investigated effects on speech production and perception, this study focuses on brain responses to structures either obeying or deviating from this rule. Event-related potentials show that rhythmic regularity is relevant for language processing: rhythmic deviations evoked different ERP components reflecting the deviance from rhythmic expectancies. An N400 effect found for shifted items reflects higher costs in lexical processing due to stress deviation. The overall results disentangle lexical and rhythmical influences on language processing and complement the findings of previous studies on rhythmical processing.

The direction of word stress processing in German: evidence from a working memory paradigm.

There are contradicting assumptions and findings on the direction of word stress processing in German. To resolve this question, we asked participants to read tri-syllabic non-words and stress ambiguous words aloud. Additionally, they also performed a working memory (WM) task (2-back task). In non-word reading, participants' individual WM capacity was positively correlated with assignment of main stress to the antepenultimate syllable, which is most distant to the word's right edge, while a (complementary) negative correlation was observed with assignment of stress to the ultimate syllable. There was no significant correlation between WM capacity and stress assignment to the penultimate syllable, which has been claimed to be the default stress pattern in German. In reading stress ambiguous words, a similar but non-significant pattern was observed as in non-word reading. In sum, our results provide first psycholinguistic evidence supporting leftward stress processing in German. Our results do not lend support to the assumption of penultimate default stress in German. A specification of the lemma model is proposed which seems able to reconcile our findings and apparently contradicting assumptions and evidence.

Prosodic constraints on inflected words: an area of difficulty for German-speaking children with specific language impairment?

Recent studies suggest that morphosyntactic difficulties may result from prosodic problems. We therefore address the interface between inflectional morphology and prosody in typically developing children (TD) and children with SLI by testing whether these groups are sensitive to prosodic constraints that guide plural formation in German. A plural elicitation task was designed consisting of 60 words and 20 pseudowords. The performance of 14 German-speaking children with SLI (mean age 7.5) was compared to age-matched controls and to younger children matched for productive vocabulary. TD children performed significantly better than children with SLI. Error analyses revealed that children with SLI produced more forms that did not meet the optimal shape of a noun plural. Beyond the fact that children with SLI have deficits in plural marking, the findings suggest that they also show reduced sensitivity to prosodic requirements. In other words, the prosodic structure of inflected words seems to be vulnerable in children with SLI.

The acquisition of prosodic constraints on derivational morphology in typically developing children and children with SLI.

Aim of this study was to investigate at what age German children master prosodic and morphological constraints in the acquisition of the word formation paradigm -heit/-keit, which is comparable to English -ness, and whether children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have difficulties identifying the prosodic cues from the input. Derived words with -heit contain simple bases with final stress and those with -keit have complex bases with a weak final syllable. Three groups of typically developing children (four, six and eight years old) and 18 children with SLI (from 8 to 10 years) had to produce either -heit or -keit derivations in a sentence completion task. The results show that typically developing children mastered these derivations by the age of six only when both prosodic and morphological cues were present, while eight-year-old children performed almost adult-like. In contrast, most children with SLI did not produce systematic responses that follow prosodic and/or morphological constraints. The findings support the assumption that children with SLI are less sensitive to prosodic properties of grammatical forms than typically developing peers.

Good, bad and ugly word stress--fMRI evidence for foot structure driven processing of prosodic violations.

Using a stress violation paradigm, we investigated whether metrical feet constrain the way prosodic patterns are processed and evaluated. Processing of correctly versus incorrectly stressed words was associated with activation in left posterior angular and retrosplenial cortex, indicating the recognition of an expected and familiar pattern, whereas the inverse contrast yielded enhanced bilateral activation in the superior temporal gyrus, reflecting higher costs in auditory (re-)analysis. More fine-grained analyses of severe versus mild stress violations revealed activations of the left superior temporal and left anterior angular gyrus whereas the opposite contrast led to frontal activations including Broca's area and its right-hemisphere homologue, suggesting that detection of mild violations lead to increased effort in working memory and deeper phonological processing. Our results provide first evidence that different incorrect stress patterns are processed in a qualitatively different way and that the underlying foot structure seems to determine potential stress positions in German words.

The influence of rhythmic (ir)regularities on speech processing: Evidence from an ERP study on German phrases.

The present study investigates the status of rhythmic irregularities occurring in natural speech and the importance of rhythmic alternations in cognitive processing. Previous studies showed the relevance of rhythm for language processing, but there has been only little research using the method of event-related potentials to investigate this phenomenon in a natural metrical context. To this end, an experiment was conducted in which the so-called Rhythm Rule (alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables) was either met or violated by stress clashes or stress lapses which are known to occur in German. The comparison of rhythmic well-formed conditions with the conditions including rhythmic irregularities revealed biphasic EEG-patterns for rhythmically marked structures, i.e., stress clashes and lapses. The present results show that irregular but possible rhythmic variants are costly in language processing, reflected by an early negativity and an N400 in contrast to the well-formed control conditions. Supposedly, the early negativity reflects error detection in rhythmical structure and supports the view that the brain is sensitive to subtle violations of rhythmical structure. A late positive component reflects the evaluation process related to the task requirements. The study shows that subtle rhythmical deviations from the Rhythm Rule are perceived and treated differently from well-formed structures during processing, even if the deviation in question is permitted and can therefore occur in language production.

Stress "deafness" in a Language with Fixed Word Stress: An ERP Study on Polish.

The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the factors influencing prosodic processing in Polish. These factors are (i) the predictability of stress and (ii) the prosodic structure in terms of metrical feet. Polish native speakers were presented with correctly and incorrectly stressed Polish words and instructed to judge the correctness of the perceived stress patterns. For some stress violations, an early negativity was found which was interpreted as a reflection of an error-detection mechanism. In addition, exceptional stress patterns (=antepenultimate stress) and post-lexical (=initial) stress evoked a task-related positivity effect (P300) whose amplitude and latency is correlated with the degree of anomaly and deviation from an expectation. In contrast, violations involving the default (=penultimate stress) did not produce such an effect. This asymmetrical result is interpreted to reflect that Polish native speakers are less sensitive to the default pattern than to the exceptional or post-lexical patterns. Behavioral results are orthogonal to the electrophysiological results showing that Polish speakers had difficulties to reject any kind of stress violation. Thus, on a meta-linguistic level Polish speakers appeared to be stress-"deaf" for any kind of stress manipulation, whereas the neural reactions differentiate between the default and lexicalized patterns.

Where the mass counts: common cortical activation for different kinds of nonsingularity.

Typically, plural nouns are morphosyntactically marked for the number feature, whereas mass nouns are morphosyntactically singular. However, both plural count nouns and mass nouns can be semantically interpreted as nonsingular. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis that their commonality in semantic interpretation may lead to common cortical activation for these different kinds of nonsingularity. To this end, we examined brain activation patterns related to three types of nouns while participants were listening to a narrative. Processing of plural compared with singular nouns was related to increased activation in the left angular gyrus. Processing of mass nouns compared with singular count nouns was related to increased activity bilaterally in the superior temporal cortex and also in the left angular gyrus. No significant activation was observed in the direct comparison between plural and mass nouns. We conclude that the left angular gyrus, also known to be relevant for numerical cognition, is involved in the semantic interpretation of different kinds of nonsingularity.

Neuro-cognitive foundations of word stress processing - evidence from fMRI.

BACKGROUND: To date, the neural correlates of phonological word stress processing are largely unknown. METHODS: In the present study, we investigated the processing of word stress and vowel quality using an identity matching task with pseudowords. RESULTS: In line with previous studies, a bilateral fronto-temporal network comprising the superior temporal gyri extending into the sulci as well as the inferior frontal gyri was observed for word stress processing. Moreover, we found differences in the superior temporal gyrus and the superior temporal sulcus, bilaterally, for the processing of different stress patterns. For vowel quality processing, our data reveal a substantial contribution of the left intraparietal cortex. All activations were modulated by task demands, yielding different patterns for same and different pairs of stimuli. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that the left superior temporal gyrus represents a basic system underlying stress processing to which additional structures including the homologous cortex site are recruited with increasing difficulty.

Event-related potentials reflecting the processing of phonological constraint violations.

How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC(i)VC(i)). We examined three types of monosyllabic late positive CCVC words: (a) existing words [see text], (b) wellformed novel words [see text] and component (c) illformed novel words [see text] as instances of Obligatory Contour Principle non-word (OCP) violations. Wellformed and illformed novel words evoked an N400 effect processing in comparison to existing words. In addition, illformed words produced an enhanced late posterior positivity effect compared to wellformed novel words. obligatory contour Our findings support the well-known observation that novel words evoke principle higher costs in lexical integration (reflected by N400 effects). Crucially, modulations of a late positive component (LPC) show that violations of phonological phonotactic constraints influence later stages of cognitive processing even constraints when stimuli have already been detected as non-existing. Thus, the comparison of electrophysiological effects evoked by the two types of non-existing words reveals the stages at which phonologically based structural wellformedness comes into play during word processing.

Neighborhood consistency in mental arithmetic: Behavioral and ERP evidence.

BACKGROUND: Recent cognitive and computational models (e.g. the Interacting Neighbors Model) state that in simple multiplication decade and unit digits of the candidate answers (including the correct result) are represented separately. Thus, these models challenge holistic views of number representation as well as traditional accounts of the classical problem size effect in simple arithmetic (i.e. the finding that large problems are answered slower and less accurate than small problems). Empirical data supporting this view are still scarce. METHODS: Data of 24 participants who performed a multiplication verification task with Arabic digits (e.g. 8 x 4 = 36 - true or false?) are reported. Behavioral (i.e. RT and errors) and EEG (i.e. ERP) measures were recorded in parallel. RESULTS: We provide evidence for neighborhood-consistency effects in the verification of simple multiplication problems (e.g. 8 x 4). Behaviorally, we find that decade-consistent lures, which share their decade digit with the correct result (e.g. 36), are harder to reject than matched inconsistent lures, which differ in both digits from the correct result (e.g. 28). This neighborhood consistency effect in product verification is similar to recent observations in the production of multiplication results. With respect to event-related potentials we find significant differences for consistent compared to inconsistent lures in the N400 (increased negativity) and Late Positive Component (reduced positivity). In this respect consistency effects in our paradigm resemble lexico-semantic effects earlier found in simple arithmetic and in orthographic input processing. CONCLUSION: Our data suggest that neighborhood consistency effects in simple multiplication stem at least partly from central (lexico-semantic') stages of processing. These results are compatible with current models on the representation of simple multiplication facts - in particular with the Interacting Neighbors Model - and with the notion of decomposed representations of two-digit numbers in general.