The role of prosody in speech language comprehension: examination by event-related potential (ERP)

摘要

In order to examine the role of prosody in Japanese sentence comprehension, we presented the garden-path sentences with prosodic biases that favored either the main-clause interpretation or the embedded-clause interpretation, and investigated ERP component elicited by these sentences. The result shows that the ERP component was greatly varied according to prosodic biases while there was a strong semantic bias. Though it was difficult to examine the time course when prosody influenced the sentence comprehension, this paper could examine this point because we used ERP measurement with high time resolution. Thus, it is though that ERP study is a very important technique to research prosody.