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.

A central question concerning word recognition is whether linguistic categories are processed in continuous or categorical ways, in particular, whether regular and irregular inflection is stored and processed by the same or by distinct systems. Here, we contribute to this issue by contrasting regular (regular stem, regular suffix) with semi-irregular (regular stem, irregular suffix) and irregular (irregular stem, irregular suffix) participle formation in a visual priming experiment on German verb inflection. We measured ERPs and RTs and manipulated the inflectional and meaning relatedness between primes and targets. Inflected verb targets (e.g., leite , “head”) were preceded either by themselves, by their participle ( geleitet , “headed”), by a semantically related verb in the same inflection as the target ( führe , “guide”) or in the participle form ( geführt , “guided”), or by an unrelated verb in the same inflection ( nenne , “name”). Results showed that behavioral and ERP priming effects were gradually affected by verb regularity. Regular participles produced a widely distributed frontal and parietal effect, irregular participles produced a small left parietal effect, and semi-irregular participles yielded an effect in-between these two in terms of amplitude and topography. The behavioral and ERP effects further showed that the priming because of participles differs from that because of semantic associates for all verb types. These findings argue for a single processing system that generates participle priming effects for regular, semi-irregular, and irregular verb inflection. Together, the findings provide evidence that the linguistic categories of verb inflection are processed continuously. We present a single-system model that can adequately account for such graded effects.

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.