04 Sep 2001

Dr Corine Astésano & Dr Mireille Besson (CNRS Marseille)

Few neurophysiological experiments have been aimed at understanding the role of prosodic cues in spoken language comprehension. Here, we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to study the relationship between semantic and prosodic processing. Results showed that an N400 was associated with semantic mismatch (right centro-parietal scalp distribution) and that a P800 was elicited by prosodic mismatch (left parietal scalp distribution). These topographic differences may indicate that different underlying generators are responsible for the semantic and prosodic effects observed at the scalp. Moreover, we were able to demonstrate that semantic information is processed predominantly with respect to prosodic information even under different task demands. The temporal alignment and the magnitude of the ERP components suggest that semantic processing is allocated more processing resources and that, at least under the specific experimental conditions of our experiment, prosodic information is underspecified during sentence comprehension.

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