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Dissociating prosodic prediction and morphological analysis with MEG and dual-frequency auditory tagging: Evidence from Swedish tone accents
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Jinhee Kwon1, Cassia Low Manting2, Mikael Roll1; 1Lund University, 2Karolinska Institutet
Swedish tone accents (Accent 1 and Accent 2) provide early prosodic cues to a noun’s morphological continuation. Accent 1 typically predicts a definite singular ending (fisk-en, “the fish”), whereas Accent 2 often signals plural or indefinite forms (fisk-ar, “fish-PL”). Electrophysiological studies have shown that such tonal cues elicit an enhanced left fronto-temporal negativity around 130–300 ms, a Pre-activation Negativity (PrAN) for the upcoming word forms modulated by the predictive strength of the ongoing phonological cue (Roll et al., 2013, 2015; Söderström et al., 2017). The suprasegmental cues contribute to probabilistic lexical access during 200-330 ms (Hjortdal et al., 2024). The predictive activities are then followed by an enhanced P600 for morphologically incongruent suffixes, reflecting morphosyntactic reanalysis (Roll et al., 2015; Söderström et al., 2017). These findings suggest that tone accent-based prediction is graded, with its strength modulated by the informativeness of the cue and unfolding across the earlier cueing and the later validation stage. The present study employs magnetoencephalography (MEG) with dual-frequency auditory tagging to dissociate cortical processes of prediction and morphological analysis within a word (Lamminmäki et al., 2014; Manting et al., 2023). Stimuli comprise a stem tone and a suffix, each amplitude-modulated at distinct frequencies at 37 Hz (F1) and 42 Hz (F2), respectively. The design allows us to trace the continuous cortical processing of the stem tone and suffix while simultaneously capturing transient event-related responses such as PrAN and P600. We predict enhanced F1 power (37 Hz) and left-temporal activation during Accent 1 stems, indexing stronger predictive engagement. Critically, F2 entrainment will track suffix-processing dynamics, and differential F2 power and phase coherence patterns are expected when the suffix confirms versus violates the stem-driven prediction. This study integrates temporal and spectral analyses, thereby linking transient event-related field (ERF) components such as the PrAN and P600 with the auditory steady-state responses (ASSR). The approach provides a mechanistic account of how prosody-driven prediction modulates morphologically constrained activation in cortical dynamics of speech processing. References Hjortdal, A., Frid, J., Novén, M., & Roll, M. (2024). Swift Prosodic Modulation of Lexical Access: Brain Potentials From Three North Germanic Language Varieties. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 67(2), 400–414. Lamminmäki, S., Parkkonen, L., & Hari, R. (2014). Human Neuromagnetic Steady-State Responses to Amplitude-Modulated Tones, Speech, and Music. Ear & Hearing, 35(4), 461–467. Manting, C. L., Gulyas, B., Ullén, F., & Lundqvist, D. (2023). Steady-state responses to concurrent melodies: Source distribution, top-down, and bottom-up attention. Cerebral Cortex, 33(6), 3053–3066. Roll, M., Söderström, P., & Horne, M. (2013). Word-stem tones cue suffixes in the brain. Brain Research, 1520, 116–120. Roll, M., Söderström, P., Mannfolk, P., Shtyrov, Y., Johansson, M., Van Westen, D., & Horne, M. (2015). Word tones cueing morphosyntactic structure: Neuroanatomical substrates and activation time-course assessed by EEG and fMRI. Brain and Language, 150, 14–21. Söderström, P., Horne, M., & Roll, M. (2017). Stem Tones Pre-activate Suffixes in the Brain. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 46(2), 271–280.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Speech Perception