Within-word prediction: from tones to segments

Description

For more than a decade, connected and fruitful lines of research have shown that Swedish and Danish listeners use word- and clause-initial prosody to predict upcoming linguistic information. In spoken-word recognition, Swedish listeners take advantage of both tones – word accents – and segments at word onsets to predict how words are going to end. This is reflected in an event-related potential: the pre-activation negativity (PrAN). In a recent lexical decision study with English listeners, we found a functionally identical but reversed PrAN effect in event-related potentials. PrAN amplitudes increased as a function of lexical competition, suggesting an important role of task and paradigms in within-word prediction research, and indicating that listeners benefit from more dense lexical neighbourhoods when deciding whether an incoming word is real or not.

Period	2023 Nov 17
Event title	Tone and prediction in language
Event type	Conference
Location	Lund, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International