Related Experiment Videos
Brain activity during speaking: from syntax to phonology in 40 milliseconds
M Turennout1, P Hagoort, C M Brown
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Science (New York, N.Y.)
|May 9, 1998
Summary
Speakers retrieve a noun's syntactic gender before its abstract phonological properties during rapid speech production. This two-step process in linguistic knowledge retrieval happens within milliseconds.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience of language
- Cognitive science
Background:
- High-speed speech production requires precise orchestration of linguistic knowledge retrieval.
- The real-time activation dynamics of syntax and phonology remain largely uncharacterized.
Purpose of the Study:
- To dynamically measure the real-time activation of syntactic and phonological knowledge during speech production.
- To investigate the temporal order of linguistic knowledge retrieval in spoken word production.
Main Methods:
- Utilized electrophysiological data to capture millisecond-precision timing.
- Focused on noun-phrase production to analyze the retrieval of syntactic and phonological information.
Main Results:
- Electrophysiological data revealed that syntactic gender is retrieved before abstract phonological properties during noun-phrase production.
- Phonological information became available as early as 40 milliseconds after syntactic properties were retrieved, indicating a rapid, sequential process.
Conclusions:
- Speech production involves a high-speed, two-step retrieval process for linguistic knowledge.
- Syntactic information processing precedes phonological information processing in real-time speech generation.