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Speaker:
Lars Meyer (MPI Leipzig)

I present a series of electroencephalography experiments that focus on syntactic ambiguities. We found that electrophysiological cycles in the order of seconds constrain ambiguity resolution, such that the grouping of words into syntactic units depends on the phase of slow-frequency neural oscillations; in other words: When a cycle ends, listeners may terminate a chunk.

In the second part of the presentation, I will suggest that periodicity as an electrophysiological bottleneck may also be reflected in linguistic corpora and even in eye movements during reading: First, we found that speech prosody is periodic at a frequency that matches the frequency of those neural oscillations that relate to prosody processing. Second, we observed that eye movements during reading display periodic slowdowns that coincide with the endings of larger syntactic units.

Abstract