This reduced late positivity

is interpreted as reflecting less effortful processing demands for updating the current discourse model in case the aboutness selleck inhibitor topic entity has previously been integrated therein. The present study supports recent evidence that during online sentence processing listeners immediately take incoming discourse information into account and dynamically adapt their internal discourse representation. This research was supported by the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 632) ‘Information structure’ funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). IW was supported by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft (Claussen-Simon-Stiftung). We thank Franziska Machens and Tobias Busch for assistance in data acquisition and analysis as well as Dr. Christina Harzman for

proof reading. “
“Current modelling of spoken word recognition is largely determined by phonemes and their establishing features. Classical models converge in the assumptions that individual speech sounds are mapped onto pre-lexical phoneme representations and that word recognition is a function of the amount of overlapping representations at the pre-lexical phoneme level and the lexical word form level (e.g., Marslen-Wilson, 1987, McClelland and Elman, 1986 and Norris, 1994). How phonological selleck chemical characteristics beyond phoneme-relevant information, such as the words’ syllables with their specific stress pattern, contribute to spoken word recognition remains unspecified in those models. Here we propose that prosodic characteristics of the speech signal have their own phoneme-free representations, which are independent from phoneme representations. We base this assumption on our previous work on the role of syllable stress in German listeners’ spoken word recognition. In stress-timed languages like German or English, typically Lumacaftor datasheet a single syllable of a multisyllabic word is perceived to be more prominent than the remaining syllable or syllables. The prominent syllable is said to be stressed. For example, the

first syllables of the words FAther or MARket, and the second syllables of the words neON and musEUM are stressed (capital letters indicate stress). Stressed syllables typically are longer, louder and marked by higher pitch than unstressed syllables (e.g., Fry, 1958). Next to those prosodic features, vowel identity might vary between stressed and unstressed syllables. While stressed syllables always contain a full vowel, unstressed syllables either contain a full vowel, such as the first syllable of neON, or they contain a reduced vowel, such as the second syllable of FAther. A confound results when stressed syllables and reduced unstressed syllables are compared. Those syllables do not only differ in their prosodic features, but also in the identity of their vowels.