Neural semantic effects of tone accents

Abstract

This study investigated whether the brain utilizes morphologically induced tones for semantic processing during online speech perception. An auditory comprehension task was conducted while measuring event-related potentials (ERPs). The study tested whether a discrepancy between contextual expectations and the tonal realizations of the target word would yield an N400 effect, indicative of semantic processing difficulty. An N400 effect was observed, reflecting integration difficulty due to semantic anomalies caused by incongruent tones. Additionally, the ERPs in the congruent conditions were modulated by the cohort entropy of the target word indicating lexical competition. The late negativity observed in this study encompasses both the N400 and preactivation negativity. This overlap underscores the brain’s potential for rapidly connecting form and meaning from different sources within the word, relying on statistically based prediction in semantic processing.