情感韵律在真假句子加工上的差异：来自ERPs的证据

采用事件相关电位(ERP)技术探讨语义-情感韵律的神经生理机制。六种基本情绪类型的韵律分两种条件呈现给被试,即假句子的韵律预期偏差条件和真句子的语义-韵律预期偏差条件。研究结果表明两种预期偏差是纯粹的价独立,无论情感价正性还是负性都会得出相同的ERP效应;六种情感韵律都诱发了右单侧化的ERP正波效应,而语义-情感韵律都诱发了早期双侧化分布的ERP负波效应。本研究进一步证实了情感韵律和语义-情感韵律加工的时间进程的差异性;同时,无论是有语义的真句子和无语义的假句子,情感韵律都能够提高表达的目的意图。     

言语产生中音韵编码的计划广度:来自图-词干扰范式的证据

采用图-词干扰范式,要求被试口语产生包含三个名词的句子,同时听觉呈现干扰刺激并操纵其与各个名词的语音相关性,通过与无关刺激相比,与各个名词语音相关的干扰刺激产生的语音效应,探讨句子产生中音韵编码的计划广度,同时检验音韵编码的层级激活假设。结果发现,只有第一个名词上出现了语音促进效应,第二和第三个名词上既无语音促进,也无语音干扰。该结果与层级激活假设相悖,表明句子产生中音韵编码的计划广度为第一个韵律词。     

句子产生中的句法启动

句子产生中的句法启动是指个体产生一个句子时,倾向于重复使用刚刚加工过的句法结构。研究发现：（1）句法启动不能简单用词汇、题元或韵律等因素来解释;（2）启动句和目标句动词、题元角色数目以及顺序是否一致,影响句法启动;（3）层级结构和线性结构具有心理现实性;（4）存在说和写之间以及从理解到产生的跨通道句法启动。这些发现促使研究者提出了新的句子产生理论,如句法启动模型和动词句法表征模型。论文最后指出了进一步研究的方向     

书面韵律信息与词汇偏向在歧义句歧义消解中的作用

本研究采用眼动法,探讨了被试在理解层次分隔歧义句时,逗号作为书面韵律边界所起到的作用,以及书面韵律边界与词汇信息如何共同影响句子加工。研究选取了裸视视力或矫正视力均正常的母语为汉语的成人,完成一个在自然情境下阅读层次分隔歧义句的句子理解实验,同时记录他们句子阅读时的眼动数据。结果发现：有逗号解歧的句子的阅读时间明显少于没有逗号解歧句子的阅读时间;逗号偏向类型和词汇偏向类型之间存在交互作用,即两者在三种眼动指标上都达到了显著性水平,研究所选的三种眼动指标为首次注视时间、第一遍阅读时间和总注视时间;此外,当逗号偏向将句子结构确定为形容词修饰整个短语结构时,词汇偏向会对语义理解进行调整,表现在三种眼动指标的显著性上。实验结果支持内隐韵律假设,书面韵律信息对歧义句歧义消解的作用从句子加工早期开始,书面韵律信息与词汇偏向的交互作用也发生于句子加工早期。     

语境情绪韵律对新异词汇学习过程的影响

模拟自然学习语境,探讨情绪韵律对具体和抽象词学习的调节作用及其产生原因。被试在高兴、愤怒、中性语境情绪韵律条件下学习抽象和具体词,记录学习过程及测试过程中的行为与脑电反应。结果发现在愤怒韵律背景下学习的抽象词加工的正确率更低、反应时更长;并且诱发了更为显著的脑电成分。表明愤怒韵律对词汇学习尤其是抽象词学习有显著的消极作用。此外,情绪韵律对词汇学习的调节作用是在学习过程中对词汇语义提取及晚期语义整合产生影响而形成的。     

言语情绪韵律加工的时间进程

有关情绪韵律加工的时间进程,现在的研究采用ERP技术在词汇和句子水平上进行探讨：在词汇水平,韵律情绪信息和语义情绪信息都存在自动加工,前者可在300ms内得以识别,受到性别、注意等因素的调节;在句子水平,语义情绪加工可能“制约”韵律情绪加工,二者具有交互作用。未来研究应进一步探索情绪韵律加工的时间进程以及与其他信息加工的相互时间关系等。     

普通话韵律词重音知觉

实验一研究了韵律词重音的多个声学相关物,及其对韵律词重音知觉贡献的大小,结果表明,按照贡献大小的次序,影响普通话韵律词重音感知的声学参数是：时长、音高、频谱倾斜和平均能量。实验二研究非声学参数因素对普通话韵律词重音知觉的影响,实验结果表明,听者关于普通话韵律词重音方面的语言学知识对韵律词重音的知觉有显著影响。     

从讲话者和听话者两个角度看韵律的句法解歧

综述了近年来韵律句法解歧方面的一些研究。首先介绍了韵律特征及其作用;其次,简单介绍了句法歧义及其加工模型;然后从讲话者和听话者两个角度,分析了讲话者在自然的情境中是否自发稳定的生成韵律线索,以及听话者是否能够即时的使用韵律信息引导最初的句法分析两个问题,并简要地阐述了汉语韵律和句法的独特特点以及国内的相关研究;最后,初步探讨了进行汉语相应研究应该注意的问题     

韵律特征研究

介绍从知觉、认知和语料库分析角度对汉语韵律特征进行的一系列研究。（1）韵律特征知觉：用实验心理学和知觉标注的语料库分析方法,研究汉语语调和音高下倾与降阶问题,语句和语篇中知觉可以区分的韵律层级及相关的声学线索。研究结果支持汉语语调的双线模型理论和语句音高下倾的存在;证明语篇中知觉可以区分的韵律边界是小句、句子和段落,及其知觉相关的声学线索。（2）韵律特征与其他语言学结构的关系：在标注的语料库的基础上,用常规统计方法研究语句常规重音分布规律、语篇信息结构与重音的关系、并用决策树方法研究根据文本信息确定韵律短语边界和焦点的规则。（3）韵律特征在语篇理解中的作用：用实验心理学方法和脑电指标研究韵律对语篇信息整合和指代理解的影响,揭示其作用的认知和神经机制。讨论了这些研究结果对语音工程、语音学理论和心理语言学研究的实践和理论意义     

韵律在语言加工中的作用及其神经机制

综述了近年来使用即时加工方法进行的韵律理解和作用机制方面的一些研究。首先, 介绍了韵律特征在句法加工中的作用, 从重音、韵律边界和韵律单元三个研究角度分析了韵律在句子理解中所起的作用及作用的时间点; 然后, 探讨了韵律加工的脑机制问题。论文最后提出未来的研究应在更广阔的视野中对韵律的加工阶段以及韵律与其他心理过程之间的关系进行探讨。     

情绪韵律调节情绪词识别的ERP研究

采用韵律/词汇干扰范式和延迟匹配任务, 通过两个ERP实验, 考察了汉语口语中情绪韵律能否、以及如何调节情绪词的识别。实验一中, 不同类型的情绪韵律分组呈现, ERP结果显示, 同与情绪韵律效价一致的情绪词相比, 与情绪韵律效价不一致的情绪词诱发了走向更负的P200、N300和N400成分; 实验二中, 不同类型的情绪韵律随机呈现, 上述效价一致性效应依然存在。实验结果表明, 情绪韵律能够调节情绪词识别, 主要表现在对情绪词的音韵编码和语义加工的双重易化上。     

Task and sex modulate the brain response to emotional incongruity in Asian listeners

In order to recognize banter or sarcasm in social interactions, listeners must integrate verbal and vocal emotional expressions. Here, we investigated event-related potential correlates of this integration in Asian listeners. We presented emotional words spoken with congruous or incongruous emotional prosody. When listeners classified word meaning as positive or negative and ignored prosody, incongruous trials elicited a larger late positivity than congruous trials in women but not in men. Sex differences were absent when listeners evaluated the congruence between word meaning and emotional prosody. The similarity of these results to those obtained in Western listeners suggests that sex differences in emotional speech processing depend on attentional focus and may reflect culturally independent mechanisms.     

The role of prosody in discourse processing

The influence of prosody and its visual analog, punctuation, in text comprehension was investigated in two experiments. In the first experiment 20 subjects listened to three taped passages of equal length and difficulty varying in intonation (normal, monotonous, or altered) and were tested on tasks of text comprehension and word recognition. In the second experiment 20 new subjects read the same passages but with varying punctuation (appropriate, no punctuation, or altered) and were also tested on text comprehension and word recognition. Subjects' reading time was also recorded. ANOVA results revealed that altered prosody and punctuation affect performance in a similar fashion and seriously impair text comprehension and word recognition. This sensitivity to altered intonation suggests that linguistic prosody not only supplies redundant cues for judging sentence structure but that it also manages attentional resources to help with semantic encoding of lexical units and with the organization of linguistic information in long term memory.     

Preschoolers use phrasal prosody online to constrain syntactic analysis

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences ([la petite ferme ] [est très jolie] ‘the small farm is very nice’ vs. [la petite] [ ferme la fenêtre] ‘the little girl closes the window’ – brackets indicate prosodic boundaries). Although these sentences start with the same three words, ferme is a noun (farm) in the former but a verb (to close) in the latter case. The only difference between these sentence beginnings is the prosodic structure, that reflects the syntactic structure (with a prosodic boundary just before the critical word when it is a verb, and just after it when it is a noun). Crucially, all words following the homophone were masked, such that prosodic cues were the only disambiguating information. Children successfully exploited prosodic information to assign the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, in both an oral completion task (4.5‐year‐olds, Experiment 1) and in a preferential looking paradigm with an eye‐tracker (3.5‐year‐olds and 4.5‐year‐olds, Experiment 2). These results show that both groups of children exploit the position of a word within the prosodic structure when computing its syntactic category. In other words, even younger children of 3.5 years old exploit phrasal prosody online to constrain their syntactic analysis. This ability to exploit phrasal prosody to compute syntactic structure may help children parse sentences containing unknown words, and facilitate the acquisition of word meanings.     

The role of prosody in the mental lexicon.

Current models of spoken word recognition take into account factors such as word frequency, word onset cohort size, and phonological neighborhood density. Using the word onset gating technique we tested word recognition when bandpass filtering was used to allow subjects to hear the full prosodic pattern of a word (number of syllables and syllabic stress), deprived of segmental information beyond that contained in the onset gate. Subjects also heard either word onsets plus duration information or only word onsets. Results suggest that word prosody is represented in the mental lexicon and is effectively used by listeners in spoken word recognition.     

The semantics of prosody: acoustic and perceptual evidence of prosodic correlates to word meaning

This investigation examined whether speakers produce reliable prosodic correlates to meaning across semantic domains and whether listeners use these cues to derive word meaning from novel words. Speakers were asked to produce phrases in infant-directed speech in which novel words were used to convey one of two meanings from a set of antonym pairs (e.g., big/small). Acoustic analyses revealed that some acoustic features were correlated with overall valence of the meaning. However, each word meaning also displayed a unique acoustic signature, and semantically related meanings elicited similar acoustic profiles. In two perceptual tests, listeners either attempted to identify the novel words with a matching meaning dimension (picture pair) or with mismatched meaning dimensions. Listeners inferred the meaning of the novel words significantly more often when prosody matched the word meaning choices than when prosody mismatched. These findings suggest that speech contains reliable prosodic markers to word meaning and that listeners use these prosodic cues to differentiate meanings. That prosody is semantic suggests a reconceptualization of traditional distinctions between linguistic and nonlinguistic properties of spoken language.     

The influence of spelling on phonological encoding in word reading, object naming, and word generation

Does the spelling of a word mandatorily constrain spoken word production, or does it do so only when spelling is relevant for the production task at hand? Damian and Bowers (2003) reported spelling effects in spoken word production in English using a prompt-response word generation task. Preparation of the response words was disrupted when the responses shared initial phonemes that differed in spelling, suggesting that spelling constrains speech production mandatorily. The present experiments, conducted in Dutch, tested for spelling effects using word production tasks in which spelling was clearly relevant (oral reading in Experiment 1) or irrelevant (object naming and word generation in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively). Response preparation was disrupted by spelling inconsistency only with the word reading, suggesting that the spelling of a word constrains spoken word production in Dutch only when it is relevant for the word production task at hand.     

The extraction of structure during reading: Evidence from reading prosody

According to the structural approach to reading, the extraction of structure precedes the analysis of meaning and paves the way for it. In this study, reading prosody was used to examine this proposition. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that reading prosody produced on line reflects the early extraction of structure. In Experiment 1, readers were successful in assigning natural prosody to unfamiliar text immediately upon its reading. Experiment 2 showed that the prosodic patterns applied are tuned to the structure of the sentence and are largely indifferent to the content of the sentence or to its semantic coherence. The results join with other findings in speech production and comprehension in supporting the precedence of structure to meaning in reading.