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Constrained structure of ancient Chinese poetry facilitates speech content grouping

  • Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic and statistical cues are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language.

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Metadaten
Author:Xiangbin TengORCiD, Min Ma, Jinbiao YangORCiD, Stefan BlohmORCiDGND, Qing Cai, Xing Tian
URN:urn:nbn:de:bsz:mh39-125810
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.059
ISSN:1879-0445
Parent Title (English):Current Biology
Publisher:Elsevier
Place of publication:Amsterdam
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of first Publication:2020
Date of Publication (online):2024/03/26
Publishing Institution:Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) [Zweitveröffentlichung]
Publicationstate:Zweitveröffentlichung
Publicationstate:Postprint
Reviewstate:Peer-Review
Tag:artificial intelligence; brain rhythms; constrained poetic structure; empirical aesthetics; integration; natural language processing; neural oscillations and entrainment; neural phase precession; poetic structure; prediction; speech; speech content grouping; speech segmentation; time windows and constants
GND Keyword:Altchinesisch; Jueju; Lyrik / Lyrik; Magnetoencephalographie; Psycholinguistik; Segmentierung
Volume:30
Issue:7
First Page:1299
Last Page:1305
DDC classes:400 Sprache / 400 Sprache, Linguistik
Open Access?:ja
Linguistics-Classification:Psycholinguistik / Kognitive Linguistik
Licence (English):License LogoCreative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International