400 Sprache, Linguistik
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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.
In conversation, interlocutors rarely leave long gaps between turns, suggesting that next speakers begin to plan their turns while listening to the previous speaker. The present experiment used analyses of speech onset latencies and eye-movements in a task-oriented dialogue paradigm to investigate when speakers start planning their responses. German speakers heard a confederate describe sets of objects in utterances that either ended in a noun [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad (“I have a door and a bicycle”)] or a verb form [e.g., Ich habe eine Tür und ein Fahrrad besorgt (“I have gotten a door and a bicycle”)], while the presence or absence of the final verb either was or was not predictable from the preceding sentence structure. In response, participants had to name any unnamed objects they could see in their own displays with utterances such as Ich habe ein Ei (“I have an egg”). The results show that speakers begin to plan their turns as soon as sufficient information is available to do so, irrespective of further incoming words.