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Dual functionality of the Swedish word accents
Poster E38 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Jinhee Kwon1, Anna Hjortdal1, Mikael Roll1; 1Lund University
Swedish word accents are known to have a stronger grammatical function than semantic distinction, although they are shaped by morphological, lexical, and information structures (Bruce, 1977). Recent studies have found evidence that the major role of the word accents is to facilitate a prediction for the upcoming morphological structure through decompositional and full-form processing routes (Roll, 2015; 2022; Schremm et al., 2018; Söderström et al., 2016; 2017). However, as a pitch accent occurs on the stressed syllable of a word, allowing maximum one pitch accent realisation per word, it is hypothesised that the semantic aspects of a word and its tonal realisation would also have an association. In the present study, a sentence comprehension task was conducted, where native South Swedish speakers were to make a quick decision on what they had heard. Stimulus sentences led the listeners to build an expectation for certain semantic aspects about the upcoming target words, while the target words unfolded with a pitch contour that was either congruent or incongruent with the sentence context. EEG was recorded using 32 channels. The behavioral data revealed a significant delay in reaction time for decision-making, indicating word accents contribute to lexicosemantic processing at the sentence level. An N400 effect was observed between 300-500 ms after the tone onset for the incongruency between the context and the target word pitch realization. A functional difference between the two word accent types was also observed at 250-400 ms post tone onset, supporting the previous studies on the prediction-based character of the pre-activation negativity (PrAN). The data seems to indicate that the Swedish word accents are lexically contrastive. Further analysis is ongoing to investigate the effect of contextual constraints. //References// Bruce, G. (1977). Swedish word accents in sentence perspective. Gleerups.// Roll, M. (2015). A neurolinguistic study of South Swedish word accents: Electrical brain potentials in nouns and verbs. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 38(2), 149–162. // Roll, M. (2022). The predictive function of Swedish word accents. Frontiers in Psychology, 13.// Schremm, A., Novén, M., Horne, M., Söderström, P., van Westen, D., & Roll, M. (2018). Cortical thickness of planum temporale and pars opercularis in native language tone processing. Brain and Language, 176, 42–47.// Söderström, P., Horne, M., Frid, J., & Roll, M. (2016). Pre-activation negativity (PrAN) in brain potentials to unfolding words. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10(OCT2016).// 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, Meaning: Lexical Semantics