Event-Related Potential Evidence of Implicit Metric Structure during Silent Reading

Under the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, readers generate prosodic structures during silent reading that can direct their real-time interpretations of the text. In the current study, we investigated the processing of implicit meter by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants read a series of 160 rhyming couplets, where the rhyme target was always a stress-alternating noun-verb homograph (e.g., permit, which is pronounced PERmit as a noun and perMIT as a verb). The target had a strong-weak or weak-strong stress pattern, which was either consistent or inconsistent with the stress expectation generated by the couplet. Inconsistent strong-weak targets elicited negativities between 80-155 ms and 325-375 ms relative to consistent strong-weak targets; inconsistent weak-strong targets elicited a positivity between 365-435 ms relative to consistent weak-strong targets. These results are largely consistent with effects of metric violations during listening, demonstrating that implicit prosodic representations are similar to explicit prosodic representations.