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Annett Schirmer
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2011) 23 (11): 3241–3253.
Published: 01 November 2011
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It is still unknown whether sonic environments influence the processing of individual sounds in a similar way as discourse or sentence context influences the processing of individual words. One obstacle to answering this question has been the failure to dissociate perceptual (i.e., how similar are sonic environment and target sound?) and conceptual (i.e., how related are sonic environment and target?) priming effects. In this study, we dissociate these effects by creating prime–target pairs with a purely perceptual or both a perceptual and conceptual relationship. Perceptual prime–target pairs were derived from perceptual–conceptual pairs (i.e., meaningful environmental sounds) by shuffling the spectral composition of primes and targets so as to preserve their perceptual relationship while making them unrecognizable. Hearing both original and shuffled targets elicited a more positive N1/P2 complex in the ERP when targets were related to a preceding prime as compared with unrelated. Only related original targets reduced the N400 amplitude. Related shuffled targets tended to decrease the amplitude of a late temporo-parietal positivity. Taken together, these effects indicate that sonic environments influence first the perceptual and then the conceptual processing of individual sounds. Moreover, the influence on conceptual processing is comparable to the influence linguistic context has on the processing of individual words.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2005) 17 (1): 1–12.
Published: 01 January 2005
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The present event-related potential (ERP) study examined the role of tone and segmental information in Cantonese word processing. To this end, participants listened to sentences that were either semantically correct or contained a semantically incorrect word. Semantically incorrect words differed from the most expected sentence completion at the tone level, at the segmental level, or at both levels. All semantically incorrect words elicited an increased frontal negativity that was maximal 300 msec following word onset and an increased centroparietal positivity that was maximal 650 msec following word onset. There were differences between completely incongruous words and the other two violation conditions with respect to the latency and amplitude of the ERP effects. These differences may be due to differences in the onset of acoustic deviation of the presented from the expected word and different mechanisms involved in the processing of complete as compared to partial acoustic deviations. Most importantly, however, tonally and segmentally induced semantic violations were comparable. This suggests that listeners access tone and segmental information at a similar point in time and that both types of information play comparable roles during word processing in Cantonese.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2003) 15 (8): 1135–1148.
Published: 15 November 2003
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The present study investigated the interaction of emotional prosody and word valence during emotional comprehension in men and women. In a prosody-word interference task, participants listened to positive, neutral, and negative words that were spoken with a happy, neutral, and angry prosody. Participants were asked to rate word valence while ignoring emotional prosody, or vice versa. Congruent stimuli were responded faster and more accurately as compared to incongruent emotional stimuli. This behavioral effect was more salient for the word valence task than for the prosodic task and was comparable between men and women. The event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a smaller N400 amplitude for congruent as compared to emotionally incongruent stimuli. This ERP effect, however, was significant only for the word valence judgment and only for female listeners. The present data suggest that the word valence judgment was more difficult and more easily influenced by task-irrelevant emotional information than the prosodic task in both men and women. Furthermore, although emotional prosody and word valence may have a similar influence on an emotional judgment in both sexes, ERPs indicate sex differences in the underlying processing. Women, but not men, show an interaction between prosody and word valence during a semantic processing stage.