TY - JOUR
T1 - Erp responses to regional accent reflect two distinct processes of perceptual compensation
AU - Voeten, Cesko C.
AU - Levelt, Clara C.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is part of the research programme Watching Dutch Change with project number PGW-15-15, which is (partly) financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Voeten and Levelt.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Humans possess a robust speech-perception apparatus that is able to cope with variation in spoken language. However, linguists have often claimed that this coping ability must be limited, since otherwise there is no way for such variation to lead to language change and regional accents. Previous research has shown that the presence or absence of perceptual compensation is indexed by the N400 and P600 components, where the N400 reflects the general awareness of accented speech input, and the P600 responds to phonological-rule violations. The present exploratory paper investigates the hypothesis that these same components are involved in the accommodation to sound change, and that their amplitudes reduce as a sound change becomes accepted by an individual. This is investigated on the basis of a vowel shift in Dutch that has occurred in the Netherlands but not in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). Netherlandic and Flemish participants were presented auditorily with words containing either conservative or novel vowel realizations, plus two control conditions. Exploratory analyses found no significant differences in ERPs to these realizations, but did uncover two systematic differences. Over 9 months, the N400 response became less negative for both groups of participants, but this effect was significantly smaller for the Flemish participants, a finding in line with earlier results on accent processing. Additionally, in one control condition where a "novel" realization wasproduced based on vowel lengthening, which cannot be achieved by any rule of either Netherlandic or Flemish Dutch and changes the vowel's phonemic identity, a P600 was obtained in the Netherlandic participants, but not in the Flemish participants. This P600 corroborates a small number of other studies which found phonological P600s, and provides ERP validation of earlier behavioral results that adaptation to variation in speech is possible, until the variation crosses a phoneme boundary. The results of this exploratory study thus reveal two types of perceptual-compensation (dys)function: On-line accent processing, visible as N400 amplitude, and failure to recover from an ungrammatical realization that crosses a phoneme boundary, visible as a P600. These results provide further insight on how these two ERPs reflect the processing of variation.
AB - Humans possess a robust speech-perception apparatus that is able to cope with variation in spoken language. However, linguists have often claimed that this coping ability must be limited, since otherwise there is no way for such variation to lead to language change and regional accents. Previous research has shown that the presence or absence of perceptual compensation is indexed by the N400 and P600 components, where the N400 reflects the general awareness of accented speech input, and the P600 responds to phonological-rule violations. The present exploratory paper investigates the hypothesis that these same components are involved in the accommodation to sound change, and that their amplitudes reduce as a sound change becomes accepted by an individual. This is investigated on the basis of a vowel shift in Dutch that has occurred in the Netherlands but not in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). Netherlandic and Flemish participants were presented auditorily with words containing either conservative or novel vowel realizations, plus two control conditions. Exploratory analyses found no significant differences in ERPs to these realizations, but did uncover two systematic differences. Over 9 months, the N400 response became less negative for both groups of participants, but this effect was significantly smaller for the Flemish participants, a finding in line with earlier results on accent processing. Additionally, in one control condition where a "novel" realization wasproduced based on vowel lengthening, which cannot be achieved by any rule of either Netherlandic or Flemish Dutch and changes the vowel's phonemic identity, a P600 was obtained in the Netherlandic participants, but not in the Flemish participants. This P600 corroborates a small number of other studies which found phonological P600s, and provides ERP validation of earlier behavioral results that adaptation to variation in speech is possible, until the variation crosses a phoneme boundary. The results of this exploratory study thus reveal two types of perceptual-compensation (dys)function: On-line accent processing, visible as N400 amplitude, and failure to recover from an ungrammatical realization that crosses a phoneme boundary, visible as a P600. These results provide further insight on how these two ERPs reflect the processing of variation.
KW - Accent processing
KW - Language change
KW - Language variation
KW - N400
KW - P600
KW - Perceptual compensation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85068497445&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/fnins.2019.00546
DO - 10.3389/fnins.2019.00546
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85068497445
SN - 1662-4548
VL - 13
JO - Frontiers in Neuroscience
JF - Frontiers in Neuroscience
IS - JUN
M1 - 546
ER -