Stan van der Burght | Dissociable effects of prosody on sentence comprehension – evidence from behavioural and neuroimaging studies

When we speak, we continuously produce small variations in speech melody, rhythm, and intensity. These acoustic features, together called “prosody”, can dramatically influence the message that we convey. Specifically, prosodic cues can play an important role in establishing who did what to whom in a sentence. My PhD work concerns the various ways in which prosody changes the interpretation of a sentence and the consequences this has for processing in the language network. In study 1, we found that prosodic cues that are required to understand the structure of a sentence recruit the left inferior frontal gyrus. Furthermore, lateralization of activity seemed to depend on the linguistic function of prosody. Study 2 explored the differential effects of prosodic cues on sentence processing and whether they establish dissociable expectations concerning the grammar (syntax) and content (semantics) of upcoming sentence elements. Study 3 aimed to dissociate syntactic and semantic processing cued by prosody within the left inferior frontal gyrus using transcranial magnetic stimulation. Together, the results from these studies underline the influential role of prosodic cues in guiding sentence comprehension and suggest a crucial role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in this process.

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