Lecture | SMILE Talks
Understanding the role of prosody at multiple levels of linguistic organization: Experimental and crosslinguistic insights
- Date
- Friday 26 September 2025
- Time
- Serie
- SMILE - Experimental Linguistics series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.78
Abstract
Prosody is crucial for transmitting information that cannot be inferred from words and grammar alone, and plays a key role in encoding functions at different levels of linguistic organization. Prosodic cues, for instance, not only distinguish lexical meaning as in the Swedish words ánden ‘the duck’ versus а̀nden ‘the spirit’, but also underpins information packaging by highlighting the most relevant constituent of the discourse, namely focus information. Despite the growing number of studies in the cognitive neuroscience of language, neural underpinnings of these prosodic functions and their interactions are not well understood. Further, there is a paucity of experimental paradigms to operationalize them in a dynamic communicative situation. In a recent series of experiments, we have aimed to contribute to the field by investigating the relevance of prosody for spoken communication at the lexical and discourse levels i) separately and concurrently ii) using psychometric and electrophysiological (EEG) measures, iii) employing typologically distinct languages, and iv) adopting ecologically valid contexts. In this talk, I will focus on two studies, in Turkish and Swedish, examining how listeners judge prosodic violations, leading to lexical and discourse level anomalies, both actively and passively. The psychometric and EEG data show that prosodic violations are judged as incorrect by the listeners both at the lexical and discourse levels. There is, however, a difference in the perceived correctness of prosodic violations depending on the level at which they occur, indicating that the language comprehension system reveals different sensitivities to prosodic violations at different levels of linguistic organization. Notably, these sensitivities are subject to cross-linguistic variation. This pattern of results suggests that the brain not only extracts prosodic cues of different origins, but also weighs them according to their relevance in a communicative context and the relative functional load of prosody in a given language.