Prosodic phrasing in the presence of unambiguous verb information--ERP evidence from German

In spoken language, prosodic boundaries contribute to the way we understand sentences on-line. The present experiment used ERPs to investigate whether the informativity of prosodic boundaries depends on the availability of other linguistic cues. To this end, we examined the interplay between verb information, case and prosody in German verb-second structures. Unlike previous studies, unambiguous verb information signaled transitivity (a two-argument structure) before reaching potential arguments. Participants listened to sentences containing a succession of two noun phrases (NPs) that were either temporarily ambiguous or unambiguous. Ambiguous NPs were locally compatible with both an argument reading and a modifier reading. Sentences were presented with an early prosodic boundary typical of an argument reading or a late prosodic boundary typical of a modifier reading. Our findings suggest that the brain considers multiple cues for determining the argument status of an NP. In the presence of unambiguous cues like case or verb information, prosodic information plays a relatively minor role than when prosody is the only unambiguous cue. Contrary to previous studies, a mismatch between prosody and argument status was reflected by a late positive complex (LPC) without a preceding N400. Thus, unlike in previous studies, prosody did not affect early processing phases of argument integration, but a later well-formedness evaluation. For ambiguous sentences, prosodic boundaries triggered reanalysis processes reflected by the LPC. Our results suggest that cognitive processes related to prosody can be modulated by the availability of other linguistic information types, thus paving the way for neurolinguistic investigations of cross-linguistic differences in prosodic effects on sentence comprehension.