As speech unfolds rapidly in time, selective temporal attention plays an important role during spoken language comprehension. Previous studies revealed that accentuation, as a prosodic cue to mark the relative prominence of the different words in sentence, can also modulate attention allocation in speech processing. However, previous studies considered the linguistic information at every time point as isolated information. What remained unknown is how and when accentuation guides selective temporal attention in continuous speech, as well as what's the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the modulation. With the help of ERP (event-related potential) and time-frequency analysis of EEG (electroencephalogram), this research project aims to 1) investigate how accentuation facilitates and inhibits selective temporal attention in the continuous speech and their time characteristics; 2) to explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms of those accentuation effects from the perspectives of 'prediction' and 'on-going brain oscillations modulation'; and 3) to examine how the attention modulated by accentuation influences semantic processing. The results of this research project will help to further reveal how and why prosodic information influences spoken language comprehension so that we can achieve a more comprehens
修改评论