This study addresses the question whether prosodic information can affect the choice for a syntactic analysis in auditory sentence processing. We manipulated the prosody (in the form of a prosodic break; PB) of locally ambiguous Dutch sentences to favor one of two interpretations. The experimental items contained two different types of so-called control verbs (subject and object control) in the matrix clause and were syntactically disambiguated by a transitive or by an intransitive verb. In Experiment 1, we established the default off-line preference of the items for a transitive or an intransitive disambiguating verb with a visual and an auditory fragment completion test. The results suggested that subject- and object-control verbs differently affect the syntactic structure that listeners expect. In Experiment 2, we investigated these two types of verbs separately in an on-line ERP study. Consistent with the literature, the PB elicited a closure positive shift. Furthermore, in subject-control items, an N400 effect for intransitive relative to transitive disambiguating verbs was found, both for sentences with and for sentences without a PB. This result suggests that the default preference for subject-control verbs goes in the same direction as the effect of the PB. In object-control items, an N400 effect for intransitive relative to transitive disambiguating verbs was found for sentences with a PB but no effect in the absence of a PB. This indicates that a PB can affect the syntactic analysis that listeners pursue.

The aim of the present experiment was to investigate differences between persons who stutter and persons who do not stutter during the production of sentences in a single task versus two dual-task conditions. Participants were required to form a sentence containing 2 unrelated nouns. In dual-task conditions, rhyme and category decisions were used as secondary tasks. The results for 14 adults who stutter and 16 adults who do not stutter are reported. Dependent variables were the number of correct rhyme and category decisions, decision latencies, length, number of propositions, sentence latency, speech rate of sentences, disfluencies, and stuttering rates. The results indicated that both groups reduced the average number of correct rhyme and category decisions when this task was performed concurrently with sentence generation and production. Similarly, the 2 groups of participants did not differ with respect to the correctness and latency of their decisions. Under single-task conditions the sentences of both groups had a comparable number of propositions. But under dual- as compared with single-task conditions persons who stutter significantly reduced the number of propositions whereas persons who do not stutter did not show a significant dual- versus single-task contrast. Experimental conditions did not significantly influence stuttering rates. These results suggest that persons who stutter require more processing capacity for sentence generation and articulation than persons who do not stutter and that both groups keep stuttering rates at a constant level by adjusting the number of propositional units of their linguistic productions. The results support the view that the organization of the speech-production system of persons who stutter makes it more vulnerable to interference from concurrent attention-demanding semantic tasks.

Although stuttering is regarded as a speech-specific disorder, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that subtle abnormalities in the motor planning and execution of non-speech gestures exist in stuttering individuals. We hypothesized that people who stutter (PWS) would differ from fluent controls in their neural responses during motor planning and execution of both speech and non-speech gestures that had auditory targets. Using fMRI with sparse sampling, separate BOLD responses were measured for perception, planning, and fluent production of speech and non-speech vocal tract gestures. During both speech and non-speech perception and planning, PWS had less activation in the frontal and temporoparietal regions relative to controls. During speech and non-speech production, PWS had less activation than the controls in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the left pre-motor areas (BA 6) but greater activation in the right STG, bilateral Heschl's gyrus (HG), insula, putamen, and precentral motor regions (BA 4). Differences in brain activation patterns between PWS and controls were greatest in females and less apparent in males. In conclusion, similar differences in PWS from the controls were found during speech and non-speech; during perception and planning they had reduced activation while during production they had increased activity in the auditory area on the right and decreased activation in the left sensorimotor regions. These results demonstrated that neural activation differences in PWS are not speech-specific.

The neurophysiological basis for stuttering may involve deficits that affect dynamic interactions among neural structures supporting fluid speech processing. Here, we examined functional and structural connectivity within corticocortical and thalamocortical loops in adults who stutter. For functional connectivity, we placed seeds in the left and right inferior frontal Brodmann area 44 (BA44) and in the ventral lateral nucleus (VLN) of the thalamus. Subject-specific seeds were based on peak activation voxels captured during speech and nonspeech tasks using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) was used to find brain regions with heightened functional connectivity with these cortical and subcortical seeds during speech and nonspeech tasks. Probabilistic tractography was used to track white matter tracts in each hemisphere using the same seeds. Both PPI and tractrography supported connectivity deficits between the left BA44 and the left premotor regions, while connectivity among homologous right hemisphere structures was significantly increased in the stuttering group. No functional connectivity differences between BA44 and auditory regions were found between groups. The functional connectivity results derived from the VLN seeds were less definitive and were not supported by the tractography results. Our data provide strongest support for deficient left hemisphere inferior frontal to premotor connectivity as a neural correlate of stuttering.

We tested the effect of local lexical ambiguities while manipulating the type of prosodic boundary at which the ambiguity occurred, using French sentences and participants. We observed delayed lexical access when a local lexical ambiguity occurred within a phonological phrase (consistent with previous research; e.g., ‘[un chat grincheux],’ containing the potential competitor word ‘ chagrin,’ was processed more slowly than ‘[un chat drogué]’ that contains no potential competitor). In contrast, when the lexical competitor straddled a phonological phrase boundary, there was no delay in lexical recognition (e.g., ‘[son grand chat] [ grimpait…],’ potential competitor ‘ chagrin,’ was not delayed relative to the non-ambiguous control). These results were observed with two different on-line tasks, word-monitoring and phoneme-monitoring. They suggest that lexical access occurs within the domain of phonological phrases. We discuss the implications of these results for models of lexical access.

To determine whether adults with persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) have auditory perceptual deficits.The authors compared the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related brain potential elicited to simple tone (frequency and duration) and phonetic contrasts in a sample of PDS subjects with that recorded in a sample of paired fluent control subjects.Subjects with developmental stuttering had normal MMN to simple tone contrasts but a significant supratemporal left-lateralized enhancement of this electrophysiologic response to phonetic contrasts. In addition, the enhanced MMN correlated positively with speech disfluency as self-rated by the subjects.Individuals with persistent developmental stuttering have abnormal permanent traces for speech sounds, and their abnormal speech sound representation may underlie their speech disorder. The link between abnormal speech neural traces of the auditory cortex and speech disfluency supports the relevance of speech perception mechanisms to speech production.

Syntactic processing was explored in individuals who stutter (IWS). Grammaticality judgments and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained while participants read sentences, half containing verb-agreement violations. Grammaticality judgments for an offline verb-agreement task did not differ between IWS and normal speakers (NS). However, judgment accuracy of IWS for the online task was lower than that of NS, particularly for verb-agreement violations that occurred in longer and more syntactically complex sentences. Further, while NS exhibited a classic P600 ERP response to verb-agreement violations, the P600s of IWS were reduced in amplitude and distribution. The behavioral and ERP results are consistent with the hypothesis that underlying mechanisms mediating language processing, including those related to postlexical syntactic reanalysis, may operate atypically in IWS even in the absence of speech production demands.

Several diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies have reported fractional anisotropy (FA) reductions within the left perisylvian white matter (WM) of persistent developmental stutterers (PSs). However, these studies have not reached the same conclusions in regard to the presence, spatial distribution (focal/diffuse), and directionality (elevated/reduced) of FA differences outside of the left perisylvian region. In addition, supplemental DTI measures (axial and radial diffusivities, diffusion trace) have yet to be utilized to examine the potential etiology of these FA reductions. Therefore, the present study sought to reexamine earlier findings through a sex- and age-controlled replication analysis and then to extend these findings with the aforementioned non-FA measures. The replication analysis showed that robust FA reductions in PSs were largely focal, left hemispheric, and within late-myelinating associative and commissural fibers (division III of the left superior longitudinal fasciculus, callosal body, forceps minor of the corpus callosum). Additional DTI measures revealed that these FA reductions were attributable to an increase in diffusion perpendicular to the affected fiber tracts (elevated radial diffusivity). These findings suggest a hypothesis that will be testable in future studies: that myelogenesis may be abnormal in PSs within left-hemispheric fiber tracts that begin a prolonged course of myelination in the first postnatal year.

Sixteen adult, right-handed, moderate-to-severe stutterers (12 males, 4 females) and 20 nonstuttering controls (10 males, 10 females) were given a dichotic nonsense-syllable test to determine hemispheric lateralization for speech. Both male and female stutterers evidenced right-ear advantages in syllable identification similar in magnitude to those found for normals. These data confirm other reports of no difference in cerebral speech lateralization for stutterers and nonstutterers and, therefore, lend no support to theories that relate stuttering to abnormalities in cerebral lateralization.

Abstract PURPOSE: Stuttering is a disorder that affects millions of people all over the world. Over the pasttwo decades, there has been a great deal of interest in investigating the neural basis of the disorder. This systematic literature review is intended to provide a comprehensive summary of theneuroimaging literature on developmental stuttering. It is a resource for researchers to quicklyand easily identify relevant studies for their areas of interest and enable them to determine themost appropriate methodology to utilize in their work. The review also highlights gaps in the literature in terms of methodology and areas of research. METHODS: We conducted a systematic literature review on neuroimaging studies on developmental stuttering according to the PRISMA guidelines. We searched for articles in the pubmed database containing "stuttering" OR "stammering" AND either "MRI", "PET", "EEG", "MEG", "TMS"or "brain" that were published between 1995/09000101/09000101 and 2016/09000101/09000101. RESULTS: The search returned a total of 359 items with an additional 26 identified from a manualsearch. Of these, there were a total of 111 full text articles that met criteria for inclusion in thesystematic literature review. We also discuss neuroimaging studies on developmental stutteringpublished throughout 2016. The discussion of the results is organized first by methodology andsecond by population (i.e., adults or children) and includes tables that contain all items returnedby the search. CONCLUSIONS: There are widespread abnormalities in the structural architecture and functional organization of the brains of adults and children who stutter. These are evident not only in speechtasks, but also non-speech tasks. Future research should make greater use of functional neuroimaging and noninvasive brain stimulation, and employ structural methodologies that havegreater sensitivity. Newly planned studies should also investigate sex differences, focus on augmenting treatment, examine moments of dysfluency and longitudinally or cross-sectionally investigate developmental trajectories in stuttering. Copyright 0008 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Abstract OBJECTIVE: The major aim of this study was to determine whether adults with persistent developmental stuttering have atypical auditory processing. BACKGROUND: Stuttering has been attributed to aberrant hemispheric dominance, and auditory processing deficits have been found in some adults who stutter. Dichotic listening, an indirect measure of auditory processing, has not been used to study auditory laterality in right- and left-handers who stutter. Because left-handers and people who stutter may have aberrant hemispheric dominance, it is important to examine auditory neural systems in right- and left-handed people who do and do not stutter. METHODS: Adults with persistent developmental stuttering (n = 18) and matched controls (n = 28) were studied by simultaneous binaural (dichotic) presentation of consonant-vowel stimuli in three attention conditions: nondirected attention, attention directed right, and attention directed left. Sex-handedness groups (stutter and control) included right-handed men and women and left-handed men, but not left-handed women because this stutter subgroup could not be recruited. To study ear advantage and auditory laterality, two dependent measures were examined: percent left and right ear responses and lateralization shift magnitude. Potential relationships between degree of handedness and dichotic listening measures were also examined. RESULTS: Matched controls and right-handed men who stutter had the expected right-ear advantage (REA) in the nondirected attention condition. In contrast, left-handed men who stutter had a left-ear advantage (LEA), and right-handed women who stutter did not have a lateral ear bias in the nondirected attention condition. Right-handed women who stutter had the greatest tendency to hear a sound that was not presented to either ear, and were relatively unable to selectively direct attention left or right. In contrast, left-handed men who stutter were able to shift attention to the left and right ear better than any other group. For the fluent control group, there were no significant relationships among degree of handedness and dichotic-listening variables. For the stutter group, degree of handedness was significantly related to percentage left and right ear response and to the lateralization shift magnitude. CONCLUSIONS: Left-handed men who stutter and right-handed women who stutter have atypical auditory processing but differ in important ways. The left-ear bias found in left-handed men who stutter in the nondirected attention condition suggests that their right temporal lobe may be important in perceiving speech, and, therefore, they have mixed dominance. These subjects were also better at shifting attention in both directions in comparison to all other groups; thus, the right hemisphere, which is dominant for shifting attention to both right and left space, may be activated. In contrast, the right-handed women who stutter had no ear bias in the nondirected attention condition, made more perceptual errors, and had difficulty shifting attention to the left and right. Although these results suggest that right-handed women who stutter have attentional deficits, the relationship between attentional disorders and stuttering remains to be elucidated. Because right-handed men who stutter were not different from controls, aberrant hemispheric dominance cannot fully account for stuttering. Unfortunately, left-handed women were not examined in this study. Therefore, these interesting sex-handedness effects found in left-handed men and right-handed women who stutter must be interpreted with caution.

THE cause of stuttering is unknown 1 . Failure to develop left-hemispheric dominance for speech is a long-standing theory 1 although others implicate the motor system more broadly 2 , often postulating hyperactivity of the right (language non-dominant) cerebral hemisphere 3 . As knowledge of motor circuitry has advanced 4 , theories of stuttering have become more anatomically specific, postulating hyperactivity of premotor cortex, either directly 5 or through connectivity with the thalamus and basal ganglia 6 . Alternative theories target the auditory 7 and speech production 8,9 systems. By contrasting stuttering with fluent speech using positron emission tomography combined with chorus reading to induce fluency, we found support for each of these hypotheses. Stuttering induced widespread over-activations of the motor system in both cerebrum and cerebellum, with right cerebral dominance. Stuttered reading lacked left-lateralized activations of the auditory system, which are thought to support the self-monitoring of speech and selectively deactivated a frontal emporal system implicated in speech production. Induced fluency decreased or eliminated the overactivity in most motor areas and largely reversed the auditory-system underactivations and the deactivation of the speech production system. Thus stuttering is a disorder affecting the multiple neural systems used for speaking.

Central auditory function was assessed in 10 stutterers and 10 nonstutterers. Performance of the two groups was compared for seven audiometric procedures including acoustic reflex threshold, acoustic reflex amplitude function, performance intensity function for monosyllabic phonetically balanced (PB) words, performance intensity function for Synthetic Sentence Identification, Synthetic Sentence Identification with Ipsilateral Competing Message, Synthetic Sentence Identification with Contralateral Competing Message, and the Staggered Spondaic Word test. Relative to the control group, the performance of the stuttering group was depressed on three procedures--the acoustic reflex amplitude function, Synthetic Identification with Ipsilateral Competing Message, and Staggered Spondaic Word test. As a group, the stutterers presented evidence of a central auditory deficiency. The pattern of test results suggests a disorder at the brainstem level. The subtlety of the deficiency is emphasized.

Bull Tokyo Med Dent Univ. 1974 Aug;21 Suppl(0):16-8.

Prosodic information is crucial for spoken language comprehension and especially for syntactic parsing, because prosodic cues guide the hearer's syntactic analysis. The time course and mechanisms of this interplay of prosody and syntax are not yet well-understood. In particular, there is an ongoing debate whether local prosodic cues are taken into account automatically or whether they are processed in relation to the global prosodic context in which they appear. The present study explores whether the perception of a prosodic boundary is affected by its position within an utterance. In an event-related potential (ERP) study we tested if the brain response evoked by the prosodic boundary differs when the boundary occurs early in a list of three names connected by conjunctions (i.e., after the first name) as compared to later in the utterance (i.e., after the second name). A closure positive shift (CPS) arking the processing of a prosodic phrase boundary as elicited for stimuli with a late boundary, but not for stimuli with an early boundary. This result is further evidence for an immediate integration of prosodic information into the parsing of an utterance. In addition, it shows that the processing of prosodic boundary cues depends on the previously processed information from the preceding prosodic context.

The purpose of this study was to see whether participants who persist in their stutter have poorer sensitivity in a backward masking task compared to those participants who recover from their stutter. The auditory sensitivity of 30 children who stutter was tested on absolute threshold, simultaneous masking, backward masking with a broadband and with a notched noise masker. The participants had been seen and diagnosed as stuttering at least 1 year before their 12th birthday. The participants were assessed again at age 12 plus to establish whether their stutter had persisted or recovered. Persistence or recovery was based on participant's, parent's and researcher's assessment and Riley's [Riley, G. D. (1994).Stuttering severity instrument for children and adults(3rd ed.). Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.] Stuttering Severity Instrument-3. Based on this assessment, 12 speakers had persisted and 18 had recovered from stuttering. Thresholds differed significantly between persistent and recovered groups for the broadband backward-masked stimulus (thresholds being higher for the persistent group). Backward masking performance at teenage is one factor that distinguishes speakers who persist in their stutter from those who recover. Education objectives: Readers of this article should: (1) explain why auditory factors have been implicated in stuttering; (2) summarise the work that has examined whether peripheral, and/or central, hearing are problems in stuttering; (3) explain how the hearing ability of persistent and recovered stutterers may differ; (4) discuss how hearing disorders have been implicated in other language disorders.

Speech is structured into parts by syntactic and prosodic breaks. In locally syntactic ambiguous sentences, the detection of a syntactic break necessarily follows detection of a corresponding prosodic break, making an investigation of the immediate interplay of syntactic and prosodic information impossible when studying sentences in isolation. This problem can be solved, however, by embedding sentences in a discourse context that induces the expectation of either the presence or the absence of a syntactic break right at a prosodic break. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were compared to acoustically identical sentences in these different contexts. We found in two experiments that the closure positive shift, an ERP component known to be elicited by prosodic breaks, was reduced in size when a prosodic break was aligned with a syntactic break. These results establish that the brain matches prosodic information against syntactic information immediately.

Subjects listened to sentences with early closure (e.g., When Roger leaves the house is dark ) or late closure syntax (e.g., When Roger leaves the house it's dark ) and one of three prosodies: cooperating (coinciding prosodic and syntactic boundary), baseline (phonetically neutralized prosodic boundary), and conflicting (prosodic boundary at a misleading syntactic location). Prosodic manipulations were verified by phonetic measurements and listener judgments. Four experiments demonstrated facilitation in speeded phonosyntactic grammaticality judgment, end-of-sentence comprehension, and cross-modal naming tasks: Sentences with cooperating prosody were processed more quickly than those with baseline prosody. Three experiments showed interference: Sentences with conflicting prosody were processed more slowly than those with baseline prosody. All experiments demonstrated a processing advantage for late closure structures in the conflicting and baseline conditions, but no differences between syntactic types in the cooperating condition. Cross-modal naming results showed early syntactic effects due to both high-level and intermediate-level prosodic boundaries. We argue that the initial syntactic structure assigned to an utterance can be determined by its prosodic phonological representation.

Neither music nor spoken language form uniform auditory streams, rather, they are structured into phrases. For the perception of such structures, the detection of phrase boundaries is crucial. We discovered electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) correlates for the perception of phrase boundaries in music. In EEG, this process was marked by a positive wave approximately between 500 and 600 ms after the offset of a phrase boundary with a centroparietal maximum. In MEG, we found major activity in an even broader time window (400-700 ms). Source localization revealed that likely candidates for the generation of the observed effects are structures in the limbic system, including anterior and posterior cingulate as well as posterior mediotemporal cortex. The timing and topography of the EEG effect bear some resemblance to a positive shift (closure positive shift, CPS) found for prosodic phrase boundaries during speech perception in an earlier study, suggesting that the underlying processes might be related. Because the brain structures, which possibly underlie the observed effects, are known to be involved in memory and attention processes, we suggest that the CPS may not reflect the detection of the phrase boundary as such, but those memory and attention related processes that are necessary to guide the attention focus from one phrase to the next, thereby closing the former and opening up the next phrase.

The present paper review the use of prosodic information in disambiguating syntactic structure in recent years.Firstly,this article introduces the prosodic properties and its function;secondly,it discusses the syntactic ambiguity and its models.Thirdly,two problems are analyzed from the point of view of speaker and listener:whether na?ve speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities in the natural context,and whether listeners use on-line prosodic information to inform initial syntactic parsing decisions.Then the characteristics of Chinese prosody and syntax are introduced,which followed by the corresponding study in China.Finally,it simply talks about what should be concerned in studying prosodic resolution of ambiguity in Chinese.

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。

The current study aimed at investigating the processing of prosodic hierarchical boundaries in Mandarin Chinese sentences using electroencephalography, mainly focused on the following questions: (1) whether prosodic boundaries at different levels could evoke the closure positive shift reflecting prosodic boundary perception; (2) what were the differences between them at latency, amplitude and topography; (3) whether this positive component was modified by the variations of acoustic cues (e.g. pause). Main results were: (1) As the previous studies indicated, intonational phrases elicited the closure positive shift as a marker of online speech structuring; (2) phonological phrases evoked the same positive effect with shorter onset latency and somewhat lower amplitude; (3) when the pauses in the vicinity of prosodic boundaries were entirely removed, the original latency difference between the two conditions disappeared, which clearly demonstrated the influence of pause on prosodic boundary processing; (4) prosodic word boundaries only induced amplitude variation waving around the baseline, which was more positive compared with the one elicited by syllable boundaries. The present results indicated that listeners were very sensitive to both intonational phrase boundaries and phonological phrase boundaries.

Prosodic boundary, as an integral part of prosodic features in spoken language, is very important in sentence and discourse comprehension. Recently, researchers have shown increasing interest in the neural mechanism of prosodic boundary processing. <BR>Numerous studies have found that CPS, a special ERP component reflecting the closure of phonological phrase, could be induced by phonological phrase boundary embedded in a sentence. Also, researches have demonstrated that intonational phrase boundary in the end of a sentence consistently elicited P3, which reflects the operation of “syntactic closure” as well as the completeness of language unit. The present study aims to investigate the cognitive processing of intonational phrase boundary embedded in discourse and its related brain effect using ERP. <BR>To explore the processing of intonational phrase boundary in discourse, quatrain was used, which is composed of four sentences and five or seven characters in each sentence. Twenty (10 males) healthy undergraduates participated in the experiment. The participants were told to listen carefully to each poem, and complete a word discrimination task. Specifically, if the word "Space" was presented, they were asked to press the spacebar to continue. If other words were presented, they were required to press the "F" or "J" key to indicate whether the word appeared in the poem they had just heard. The EEG was recorded from 64 scalp channels using electrodes mounted in an elastic cap. Boundary-related ERPs were calculated for a 1500 ms epoch including a 200 ms pre-boundary syllable baseline. <BR>It was found that the three intonational phrase boundaries embedded in the quatrain elicited CPS respectively, with no differences in time course, amplitude and scalp distribution, indicating that prosodic boundary processing was not influenced by its position in discourse. Moreover, the final sentence of both five-character-quatrain and seven-character-quatrain evoked the P3 effect, with the amplitude elicited by the former one lower than that of the later one, but no differences in scalp distribution and onset latency. <BR>The present study suggests that boundaries conveying both the closure of preceding information and the prediction of upcoming information will induce CPS, while boundaries reflecting only the closure of preceding information will elicit P3. The nature and characteristics of these two components were also discussed in the present study. <BR>

语言理解过程中,句子内部的韵律短语边界会诱发反映韵律短语终止的特异性脑电成分终止正漂移（CPS,closure positive shift）,而句末语调短语边界则会诱发反映句法终止和完整语言单元结束的脑电效应P3。研究采用汉语特有的语篇绝句,考察了听者加工绝句中各句末语调短语边界的认知过程及其诱发的脑电效应。结果发现五言绝句内部各语调短语边界分别诱发了时间进程、头皮分布和波幅均相同的CPS,表明语篇内部韵律边界加工不受其所处语篇位置的影响;五言和七言绝句末的韵律边界则分别诱发了一个P3,并且前者诱发的P3波幅小于后者,而二者在时间进程和头皮分布上不存在差异。本研究表明,句末语调短语边界诱发何种脑电效应与其承担的功能有关,既表示前面信息终止又预期后面信息出现的句末边界会诱发CPS,而只表示信息终止的句末边界则会诱发P3。

A neural correlate for phrase boundary perception in language has recently been identified as a reliable and replicable brain effect. It is called the closure positive shift (CPS) and has an equivalent in the perception of music (music CPS). Nevertheless, either in language or in music, this component is elicited by phrase boundary embedded in sentence or melody. Poetry, as the interlude of language and music, is a special kind of discourse and promising material to explore prosodic boundary processing beyond sentence level. The aim of the present study was to investigate the cognitive processing of hierarchical prosodic boundaries in Chinese Tang poem using rhythm matching task. There are generally four hierarchical levels in each poem, including foot boundary, phonological phrase boundary, intonational phrase boundary, and couplet boundary. The electrophysiological results indicated that all the prosodic boundaries of different levels in poems could give rise to the CPS reflecting prosodic phrasing. Furthermore, as the prosodic hierarchical level became higher, the onset latency of the CPS got longer, suggesting the influence of retrospective processing of former information. With regard to the amplitude, we analyzed the CPS amplitude in every 100 ms time window. It was showed that phonological phrase boundary elicited higher CPS amplitude as compared to that evoked by couplet boundary in an earlier time window, whereas in a later time window both of them were lower than the CPS correlated to intonational phrase boundary. The present results further shape our understanding of the CPS component and its relation to the processes involved in prosodic phrasing.

In the present study, the ERP (event-related brain potentials) technique was used to investigate how and when prosodic boundaries interact with ongoing discourse context during on-line syntactic processing and especially the precise time characteristics of this prosodic boundaries effect. Chinese question nswer dialogues were used as stimuli. The answers were syntactically ambiguous phrases, the meaning of which could be biased via changing the preceding question context or the prosodic boundaries in the carrier sentence. The results revealed that, first, presence of prosodic boundaries, relative to absence of these boundaries, evoked a P2 effect. Second and importantly, there was an immediate interaction between discourse context and prosodic boundaries. When the prosodic boundaries were inconsistent with the syntactic interpretation built upon the ongoing discourse context, a left-anterior distributed LAN effect or a combined LAN and N400 effect was elicited (time-locked to the critical words at the immediate right side of prosodic boundaries). The results indicated that prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing and can be immediately integrated with the ongoing discourse context during spoken discourse comprehension. In addition, the LAN effect elicited by prosodic boundaries violation indicated that prosodic information may affect the initial incorporation of a word into the syntactic structure in speech processing.

Several authors have suggested that devices delivering altered auditory feedback (AAF) may be a viable treatment for adults and children who stutter. This paper reviews published, peer reviewed journal papers from the past 10 years that investigate the effect of AAF during different speaking conditions, tasks and situations. A review of that literature indicates that considerable experimental evidence and limited Phase 1 treatment outcome evidence has been accumulated about the effect of AAF on the speech of people who stutter. However, critical knowledge about the effect of AAF during conversational speech and in everyday speaking situations is missing. Knowledge about how to determine the correct levels of AAF for individuals, and the characteristics of those likely to benefit from AAF, also needs to be established. At present there is no reason to accept a recent suggestion that AAF devices would be a defensible clinical option for children. In general device development and availability has occurred at a faster pace than clinical trials research. Educational objectives: After reading this paper readers should be able to: (1) describe what altered auditory feedback is and common ways the speech signal is altered in stuttering; (2) describe the effects of AAF on the speech of adults who stutter; (3) provide a critical analysis of the literature in the area of AAF and stuttering.

In this paper, we aim to study the effects of Chinese punctuations in sentence comprehension, and to prove metafunctions of Chinese punctuations, namely the ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. By using Chinese sentences containing punctuations as stimuli, an experiment with three tasks is conducted using event-related potential (ERP) method. Focusing on ERP components such as P2, closure positive shift (CPS), late positive shift, N400 and P600, we have proven that: (1) punctuations in Chinese sentences could affect the earlier orthographic extraction processing; (2) punctuations in Chinese sentences could serve on the prosodic boundary in reading; (3) the commas within Chinese sentences could change the syntactic structures of sentences, and play a role of lexical parsing and sentence phrasing, leading the semantic comprehension of sentences to be changed. The results show that ideational and textual metafunctions are present in Chinese punctuations, while the interpersonal metafunction of Chinese punctuations remains to be further identified. This study serves to extend the research of punctuations in linguistics.

Electroencephalography (EEG) was used in a cross-cultural music study investigating phrase boundary perception. Chinese and German musicians performed a cultural categorization task under Chinese and Western music listening conditions. Western music was the major subject for both groups of musicians, while Chinese music was familiar to Chinese subjects only. By manipulating the presence of pauses between two phrases in the biphrasal melodies, EEG correlates for the perception of phrase boundaries were found in both groups under both music listening conditions. Between 450 and 60002ms, the music CPS (closure positive shift), which had been found in earlier studies with a false tone detection task, was replicated for the more global categorization task and for all combinations of subject group and musical style. At short latencies (100 and 45002ms post phrase boundary offset), EEG correlates varied as a function of musical styles and subject group. Both bottom–up (style properties of the music) and top–down (acculturation of the subjects) information interacted during this early processing stage.

Four experiments systematically investigating the brain's response to the perception of sentences containing differing amounts of linguistic information are presented. Spoken language generally provides various levels of information for the interpretation of the incoming speech stream. Here, we focus on the processing of prosodic phrasing, especially on its interplay with phonemic, semantic, and syntactic information. An event-related brain potential (ERP) paradigm was chosen to record the on-line responses to the processing of sentences containing major prosodic boundaries. For the perception of these prosodic boundaries, the so-called closure positive shift (CPS) has been manifested as a reliable and replicable ERP component. It has mainly been shown to correlate to major intonational phrasing in spoken language. However, to define this component as exclusively relying on the prosodic information in the speech stream, it is necessary to systematically reduce the linguistic content of the stimulus material. This was done by creating quasi-natural sentence material with decreasing semantic, syntactic, and phonemic information (i.e., jabberwocky sentences, in which all content words were replaced by meaningless words; pseudoword sentences, in which all function and all content words are replaced by meaningless words; and delexicalized sentences, hummed intonation contour of a sentence removing all segmental content). The finding that a CPS was identified in all sentence types in correlation to the perception of their major intonational boundaries clearly indicates that this effect is driven purely by prosody.

Background The closure positive shift (CPS) event related potential (ERP) is commonly used as a neural measure of phrase boundary perception in speech. The present study investigated whether the CPS was elicited by acoustic cues at phrase boundaries in English. ERPs were recorded when participants listened passively to sentences with either early or late phrase boundaries. Results The closure positive shift (CPS) ERP was elicited at both early and late phrase boundaries. However, the latency, amplitude, and scalp distribution of these passive CPS ERPs in English sentences differed to active CPS ERPs measured in non-English sentences in previous studies. Conclusions These results show that acoustic cues at the phrase boundaries in English are sufficient to elicit the CPS, and suggest that different processes might be involved in the generation of the CPS in active and passive conditions.

Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms or whether a subset of such mechanisms is shared with other organisms. To explore this problem, parallel experiments were conducted on human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys to assess their ability to discriminate unfamiliar languages. A habituation-dishabituation procedure was used to show that human newborns and tamarins can discriminate sentences from Dutch and Japanese but not if the sentences are played backward. Moreover, the cues for discrimination are not present in backward speech. This suggests that the human newborns' tuning to certain properties of speech relies on general processes of the primate auditory system.

Participants' eye movements were monitored as they heard sentences and saw four pictured objects on a computer screen. Participants were instructed to click on the object mentioned in the sentence. There were more transitory fixations to pictures representing monosyllabic words (e.g. ham) when the first syllable of the target word (e.g. hamster) had been replaced by a recording of the monosyllabic word than when it came from a different recording of the target word. This demonstrates that a phonemically identical sequence can contain cues that modulate its lexical interpretation. This effect was governed by the duration of the sequence, rather than by its origin (i.e. which type of word it came from). The longer the sequence, the more monosyllabic-word interpretations it generated. We argue that cues to lexical-embedding disambiguation, such as segmental lengthening, result from the realization of a prosodic boundary that often but not always follows monosyllabic words, and that lexical candidates whose word boundaries are aligned with prosodic boundaries are favored in the word-recognition process.

The effect of prosodic boundary cues on the off-line disambiguation and on-line parsing of coordination structures was examined. It was found that relative clauses were attached to coordinated object noun phrases in preference to second conjuncts in sentences like: The lawyer greeted the powerful barrister and the wise judge who was/were walking to the courtroom. Naive speakers signalled the syntactic contrast between the two structures by a prosodic break between the conjuncts when the relative clause was attached to the second conjunct. Listeners were able to use this prosodic information in both off-line syntactic disambiguation and on-line syntactic parsing. The findings are compatible with a model in which prosody has a strong immediate effect on parsing. It is argued that the current experimental design has avoided confounds present in earlier studies on the on-line integration of prosodic and syntactic information.

In this tutorial we present evidence that, because syntax does not fully predict the way that spoken utterances are organized, prosody is a significant issue for studies of auditory sentence processing. We describe the basic elements and principles of current prosodic theory, review the psycholinguistic evidence that supports an active role for prosodic structure in sentence representation, and provide a road map of references that contain more complete arguments about prosodic structure and prominence. Because current theories do not predict the precise prosodic shape that a particular utterance will take, it is important to determine the prosodic choices that a speaker has made for utterances that are used in an auditory sentence processing study. To this end, we provide information about practical tools such as systems for signal display and prosodic transcription, and several caveats which we have found useful to keep in mind .

Abstract Purpose: We advanced a multifactorial, dynamic account of the complex, nonlinear interactions of motor, linguistic, and emotional factors contributing to the development of stuttering. Our purpose here is to update our account as the multifactorial dynamic pathways theory. Method: We review evidence related to how stuttering develops, including genetic/epigenetic factors; motor, linguistic, and emotional features; and advances in neuroimaging studies. We update evidence for our earlier claim: Although stuttering ultimately reflects impairment in speech sensorimotor processes, its course over the life span is strongly conditioned by linguistic and emotional factors. Results: Our current account places primary emphasis on the dynamic developmental context in which stuttering emerges and follows its course during the preschool years. Rapid changes in many neurobehavioral systems are ongoing, and critical interactions among these systems likely play a major role in determining persistence of or recovery from stuttering. Conclusion: Stuttering, or childhood onset fluency disorder (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013), is a neurodevelopmental disorder that begins when neural networks supporting speech, language, and emotional functions are rapidly developing. The multifactorial dynamic pathways theory motivates experimental and clinical work to determine the specific factors that contribute to each child's pathway to the diagnosis of stuttering and those most likely to promote recovery.

Abstract Spoken language, in contrast to written text, provides prosodic information such as rhythm, pauses, accents, amplitude and pitch variations. However, little is known about when and how these features are used by the listener to interpret the speech signal. Here we use event-related brain potentials (ERP) to demonstrate that intonational phrasing guides the initial analysis of sentence structure. Our finding of a positive shift in the ERP at intonational phrase boundaries suggests a specific on-line brain response to prosodic processing. Additional ERP components indicate that a false prosodic boundary is sufficient to mislead the listener's sentence processor. Thus, the application of ERP measures is a promising approach for revealing the time course and neural basis of prosodic information processing.

Just as the false comma in this sentence, shows punctuation can influence sentence processing considerably. Pauses and other prosodic cues in spoken language serve the same function of structuring the sentence in smaller phrases. However, surprisingly little effort has been spent on the question as to whether both phenomena rest on the same mechanism and whether they are equally efficient in guiding parsing decisions. In a recent study, we showed that auditory speech boundaries evoke a specific positive shift in the listeners' event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that indicates the sentence segmentation and resulting changes in the understanding of the utterance (Steinhauer et al., 1999a). Here, we present three ERP reading experiments demonstrating that the human brain processes commas in a similar manner and that comma perception depends crucially on the reader's individual punctuation habits. Main results of the study are: (1) Commas can determine initial parsing as efficiently as speech boundaries because they trigger the same prosodic phrasing covertly, although phonological representations seem to be activated to a lesser extent. (2) Independent of the input modality, this phrasing is reflected online by the same ERP component, namely the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). (3) Both behavioral and ERP data suggest that comma processing varies with the readers' idiosyncratic punctuation habits. (4) A combined auditory and visual ERP experiment shows that the CPS is also elicited both by delexicalized prosody and while subjects replicate prosodic boundaries during silent reading. (5) A comma-induced reversed garden path turned out to be much more difficult than the classical garden path. Implications for psycholinguistic models and future ERP research are discussed.

Abstract The role of neurolinguistic factors in stuttering was investigated by determining whether individuals who stutter display atypical neural functions for language processing, even with no speech production demands. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were obtained while 9 individuals who stutter (IWS) and 9 normally fluent speakers (NS) read sentences silently. The ERPs were elicited by: (a) closed-class words that provide structural or grammatical information, (b) open-class words that convey referential meaning, and (c) semantic anomalies (violations in semantic expectation). In standardized tests, adult IWS displayed similar grammatical and lexical abilities in both comprehension and production tasks compared to their matched, normally fluent peers. Yet the ERPs elicited in IWS for linguistic processing tasks revealed differences in functional brain organization. The ERPs elicited in IWS were characterized by reduced negative amplitudes for closed-class words (N280), open-class words (N350), and semantic anomalies (N400) in a temporal window of approximately 200-450 ms after word onsets. The overall pattern of results indicates that alterations in processing for IWS are related to neural functions that are common to word classes and perhaps involve shared, underlying processes for lexical access.

Purpose: Previous findings from event-related brain potentials ( ERPs) indicate that adults who stutter (AWS) exhibit processing differences for visually presented linguistic information. This study explores how neural activations for AWS may differ for a linguistic task that does not require preparation for overt articulation or engage the articulatory loop for silent speech. Method: Syntactic and semantic processing constraints were examined in AWS and adults who are normally fluent (AWNF) by assessment of their behavioral performance and ERPs in a natural speech listening task. Results: AWS performed similarly to AWNF in identifying verb-agreement violations and semantic anomalies, but ERPs elicited by syntactic and semantic constraints indicated atypical neural functions for AWS. ERPs of the AWNF displayed an expected N400 for reduced semantic expectations and a typical P600 for verb-agreement violations. In contrast, both N400s and P600s for the semantic and verb-agreement conditions were observed in the ERPs of the AWS. Conclusions: The findings suggest that AWS may engage semantic-syntactic mechanisms more generally for semantic and syntactic processing. These findings converge with earlier studies using visual stimuli to indicate that whereas linguistic abilities are normal in AWS, underlying brain activity mediating some aspects of language processing may function differently.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), judgment accuracy, and reaction times (RTs) were obtained for 11 adults who stutter and 11 normally fluent speakers as they performed a rhyme judgment task of visually presented word pairs. Half of the word pairs (i.e., prime and target) were phonologically and orthographically congruent across words. That is, the words looked orthographically similar and rhymed (e.g., thrown, own) or did not look similar and did not rhyme (e.g., cake, own). The phonologic and orthographic information across the remaining pairs was incongruent. That is, the words looked similar but did not rhyme (e.g., gown, own) or did not look similar but rhymed (e.g., cone, own). Adults who stutter and those who are normally fluent exhibited similar phonologic processing as indexed by ERPs, response accuracy, and RTs. However, longer RTs for adults who stutter indicated their greater sensitivity to the increased cognitive loads imposed by phonologic/orthographic incongruency. Also, unlike the normally fluent speakers, the adults who stutter exhibited a right hemisphere asymmetry in the rhyme judgment task, as indexed by the peak amplitude of the rhyming effect (difference wave) component. Overall, these findings do not support theories of the etiology of stuttering that posit a core phonologic-processing deficit. Rather we provide evidence that adults who stutter are more vulnerable to increased cognitive loads and display greater right hemisphere involvement in late cognitive processes.

Previous research in several European languages has shown that the language processing system is sensitive to both structural frequency and structural priming effects. However, it is currently not clear whether these two types of effects interact during online sentence comprehension, especially for languages that do not have morphological markings. To explore this issue, the present study investigated the possible interplay between structural priming and frequency effects for sentences containing the Chinese ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2 in a self-paced reading experiment. The sentences were disambiguated to either the more frequent/preferred NP structure or the less frequent VP structure. Each target sentence was preceded by a prime sentence of three possible types: NP primes, VP primes, and neutral primes. When the ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2 was disambiguated to the dispreferred VP structure, participants experienced more processing difficulty following an NP prime relative to following a VP prime or a neutral baseline. When the ambiguity was resolved to the preferred NP structure, prime type had no effect. These results suggest that structural priming in comprehension is modulated by the baseline frequency of alternative structures, with the less frequent structure being more subject to structural priming effects. These results are discussed in the context of the error-based, implicit learning account of structural priming.

Epidemiological advances in stuttering during the current century are reviewed within the perspectives of past knowledge. The review is organized in six sections: (a) onset, (b) incidence, (c) prevalence, (d) developmental paths, (e) genetics and (f) subtypes. It is concluded that: (1) most of the risk for stuttering onset is over by age 5, earlier than has been previously thought, with a male-to-female ratio near onset smaller than what has been thought, (2) there are indications that the lifespan incidence in the general population may be higher than the 5% commonly cited in past work, (3) the average prevalence over the lifespan may be lower than the commonly held 1%, (4) the effects of race, ethnicity, culture, bilingualism, and socioeconomic status on the incidence/prevalence of stuttering remain uncertain, (5) longitudinal, as well as incidence and prevalence studies support high levels of natural recovery from stuttering, (6) advances in biological genetic research have brought within reach the identification of candidate genes that contribute to stuttering in the population at large, (7) subtype-differentiation has attracted growing interest, with most of the accumulated evidence supporting a distinction between persistent and recovered subtypes. Educational objectives: Readers will be exposed to a summary presentation of the most recent data concerning basic epidemiological factors in stuttering. Most of these factors also pertain to children's risks for experiencing stuttering onset, as well as risks for persistency. The article also aims to increase awareness of the implications of the information to research, and professional preparation that meets the epidemiology of the disorder.

The presence of an intonational phrase boundary is often marked by three major acoustic cues: pause, final lengthening, and pitch reset. The present study investigates how these three acoustic cues are weighted in the perception of intonational phrase boundaries in two experiments. Sentences that contained two intonational phrases with a critical boundary between them were used as the experimental stimuli. The roles of the three acoustic cues at the critical boundary were manipulated in five conditions. The first condition featured none of the acoustic cues. The following three conditions featured only one cue each: pause, final lengthening, and pitch reset, respectively. The fifth condition featured both pause duration and pre-final lengthening. A baseline condition was also included in which all three acoustic cues were preserved intact. Listeners were asked to detect the presence of the critical boundaries in Experiment 1 and judge the strength of the critical boundaries in Experiment 2. The results of both experiments showed that listeners used all three acoustic cues in the perception of prosodic boundaries. More importantly, these acoustic cues were weighted differently across the two experiments: Pause was a more powerful perceptual cue than both final lengthening and pitch reset, with the latter two cues perceptually equivalent; the effect of pause and the effects of the other two acoustic cues were not additive. These results suggest that the weighting of acoustic cues contributes significantly to the perceptual differences of intonational phrase boundary.

This paper describes a new instrument for evaluating the experience of the stuttering disorder from the perspective of individuals who stutter. Based on the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health [World Health Organization (2001). The International Classification of Functioning, Disability, & Health. Geneva: World Health Organization], the Overall Assessment of the Speaker' s Experience of Stuttering (OASES) collects information about the totality of the stuttering disorder, including: (a) general perspectives about stuttering, (b) affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions to stuttering, (c) functional communication difficulties, and (d) impact of stuttering on the speaker's quality of life. This paper summarizes scale development, reliability and validity assessment, and scoring procedures so clinicians and researchers can use the OASES to add to the available evidence about the outcomes of a variety of treatment approaches for adults who stutter. Educational objectives: As a result of this activity, participants will be able to: (1) identify key issues related to the documentation of treatment outcomes in stuttering; (2) discuss the components of the international classification of functioning, disability, and health as they relate to the documentation of stuttering treatment outcomes; (3) evaluate and use a new measurement instrument for assessing the outcomes of stuttering treatment from the perspective of the person who stutters.

61We examined the processing of hierarchical boundaries in natural music by EEG.61Musical excerpts were presented to musicians and non-musicians.61Perception of hierarchical boundaries in music is modulated by musical expertise.61Musicians establish a hierarchical representation of musical structure at different timescales.61Non-musicians process musical boundaries in a different and less clear way.

In Chinese language, there are three types of phrases, which are composed of one verb, t2o nouns,and one auxiliary, and are temporarily ambiguous between modifier-noun construction (MNC) andnarrative-object structure(NOS). Two of them bias towards either MNC or NOS. The third one isbalanced between MNC and NOS. Directions of being continued, ambiguity, and the types of thesephrases were manipulated to examine the processing of these phrases in sentence reading. With asubject self-paced word-by-word moving window paradigm, significant garden-path effects were foundon the second disambiguating region when ambiguous phrases were continued inappropriately. Mostimportant, subjects resolved the syntactic ambiguity of balanced phrases as modifier-noun structure,which was discussed in terms of sentence parsing principles proposed by garden path models, the resultsof corpus analysis conducted here, and the integrality of verb argument structures.