Prosodic Focus Marking in Turkish:An Electrophysiological Study

Yıl 2021, Cilt: 41 Sayı: 1, 331 - 364, 08.02.2021

İpek Pınar Uzun , Özgür Aydın Canan Kalaycıoğlu İclal Ergenç

https://doi.org/10.26650/SP2020-0065

Öz

Focused elements are generally marked with syntactic canonicity and prosody. Being a scrambled language, Turkish uses both syntactic and prosodic information to mark the focus. However, it does not allow for focus marking in post-verbal position. In this study, the neurophysiological processes of the focus in Turkish are examined by using prosodic and syntactic information. Recent psycholinguistics studies assume that there is an interaction between prosody and syntax through the focus in the online sentence comprehension process. Thirty participants (16 female and 14 male between the ages of 19 and 33), whose native language was Turkish and who spoke monolingual Turkish, and who did not have any neurological, hearing, or linguistic impairments, took part in the experiments measured with Electroencephalogram (EEG). Using an event-related potentials (ERPs) design, this study provides evidence for an interaction between prosody and syntax in Turkish. The experimental design of the study consisted of prosodic, syntactic, and prosodic-syntactic violations. Participants were asked to listen 300 auditory stimuli (100 filler sentences) including sentences with both congruent and incongruent focus. The stimuli consisted of 50 sentences for each experimental condition. All critical words occurred in the sentence-final positions. For the prosodic violation critical words were focused via incongruent focusing on post-verbal position, and for the syntactic violation critical words were manipulated with case marking manipulation (i.e., accusative case versus dative case violations). In addition, for the interaction of prosodic and syntactic violations, critical words were incongruent focused and incongruent case was marked. The results revealed that prosodic incongruity elicited a broadly distributed positivity in posterior regions (400-1200 ms) lateralized to the left hemisphere and a right anterior negativity (RAN) (300-500 ms) effect. Syntactic violations also indicated a distributed anterior negativity (300-500 ms) effect. Supportive evidence for the late interaction of prosodic and syntactic processing in the neural integration of positive 600 (P600) and Closure Positive Shift (CPS) was observed. The findings provide support for recent neurocognitive approaches for late interaction between prosody and syntax in the sentence-final position in Turkish sentences.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Focus, prosody, syntax, event-related potentials, auditory sentence comprehension

Kaynakça

• Atasoy, A., Höhle, B., Bastiaanse, R., & Popov, S. (2020). Focus and focus asymmetries in Turkish naturalistic speech. Unpublished manuscript, IdeaLab (International Doctorate for Experimental Approaches to Language and Brain), University of Groningen. google scholar
• Aydın, Ö., & Cedden, G. (2010). Sözdizim işlemlemesinde sağa taşıma etkisi. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi, 21(1), 1-9. doi: 10.18492/dad google scholar
• Batman-Ratyosyan, N., & Stromswold, K. (1999). What Turkish acquisition tells us about underlying word order and scrambling. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 6, 37-52. google scholar
• Bayrak-Kurt, D. (2020). Processing focus structures in L1 Turkish and L2 English. (Unpublished Master Thesis). Boğaziçi University, Department of Foreign Language Education. google scholar
• Beckman, M. E. (1996). The parsing of prosody. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 17-67. google scholar
• Bekar, İ. P. (2016). Türkçede eylem-sonu konumunda bürün-sözdizim etkileşimi: Bir elektrofizyolojik inceleme. (Unpublished PhD Thesis). Ankara University, Department of Linguistics. google scholar
• Boersma, P. (2006). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. Retrieved from: http://www. praat. org/. google scholar
• Bögels, S., Schriefers, H., Vonk, W., Chwilla, D. J., & Kerkhofs, R. (2010). The interplay between prosody and syntax in sentence processing: The case of subject- and object-control verbs. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(5), 1036-1053. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21269 google scholar
• Bögels, S., Schriefers, H., Vonk, W., & Chwilla, J. D. (2011). The role of prosodic breaks and pitch accent in grouping words during on-line sentence processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(9), 2447-2467. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2010.21587 google scholar
• Cedden, G., & Aydın, Ö. (2019). Do non-native languages have an effect on word order processing in first languageTurkish?. InternationalJournal ofBilingualism, 23(4), 804-816. doi: 10.1177/1367006917703454 google scholar
• Chapman, L., & Chapman, J. P. (1987). The measurement of handedness. Brain and Cognition, 6, 175 -83. doi: 10.1016/0278-2626(87)90118-7 google scholar
• Coulson, S., King, J. W., & Kutas, M. (1998). Expect the unexpected: Event-related brain response to morphosyntactic violations. Language and Cognitive Processes, 13, 21-58. doi: 10.1080/016909698386582 google scholar
• Delogu, F., Brouwer, H., & Crocker, M.W. (2019). Event-related potentials index lexical retrieval (N400) and integration (P600) during language comprehension. Brain and Cognition, 135, 103569. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2019.05.007 google scholar
• Deniz, N. D., & Fodor, J. D. (2017). Phrase lengths and the perceived informativeness of prosodic cues in Turkish. Language and Speech, 60(4), 505-529. doi: 10.1177/0023830916665653 google scholar
• Dinçtopal-Deniz, N. (2010). Relative clause attachment preferences of Turkish L2 speakers of English: Shallow parsing in the L2? In B. VanPatten, & J. Jegerski (Eds.), Research on second language processing and parsing (pp. 27-63). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: doi.org/10.1075/ lald.53.02din google scholar
• Duman, T.Y., Aygen, G., Özgirgin, N., & Bastiaanse, R. (2007). Object scrambling and finiteness in Turkish agrammatic production. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20(4), 306-331. doi: 10.1016/j. jneuroling.2007.01.001 google scholar
• Eckstein, K., & Friederici, A. D. (2005). Late interaction of syntactic and prosodic processes in sentence comprehension as revealed by ERPs. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 130-143. doi: 10.1016/j. cogbrainres.2005.05.003 google scholar
• Eckstein, K., & Friederici, A. D. (2006). It’s early: Event-related potential evidence for initial interaction of syntax and prosody in speech comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 16961711. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2006.18.10.1696 google scholar
• Ergenç, İ. (1995). Konuşma dili ve Türkçenin söyleyiş sözlüğü. Ankara: Multilingual. google scholar
• Erguvanlı, E. E. (1984). The function of word order in Turkish grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. google scholar
• Friederici, A. D. (2002). Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 78-84. doi: 10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01839-8 google scholar
• Friederici, A. D., & Frisch, S. (2000). Verb Argument Structure Processing: The Role of Verb Specific and Argument-Specific Information. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 476-507. doi: 10.1006/ jmla.2000.2709 google scholar
• Frisch, S., & Schlesewsky, M. (2001). The N400 reflects problems of thematic hierarchizing. NeuroReport, 12, 3391-3394. doi: 10.1097/00001756-200110290-00048 google scholar
• Frisch, S., & Schlesewsky, M. (2005). The resolution of case conflicts from a neurophysiological perspective. Cognitive Brain Research, 25(2), 484-498. doi: 10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2005.07.010 google scholar
• Göksel, A. (1998). Linearity, focus, and the post-verbal position in Turkish. In L. Johanson (Ed.), The Mainz Meeting Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, (pp. 85-106), Wiesbaden: Harrosowitz, Verlag. google scholar
• Göksel, A. (2013). Flexible word order and anchors of the clause. SOAS Working Papers in Linguistics, 16, 3-25. google scholar
• Göksel, A., & Özsoy, S. (2000). Is there a focus position in Turkish? In A. Göksel, & C. Kerslake (Eds.), Proceedings of Ninth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics. (pp. 219-228). Wiesbaden: Harrosowitz, Verlag. google scholar
• Göksel, A., & Özsoy, A. S. (2003). dA: a focus/topic associated clitic in Turkish. Lingua, 113, 11431167. doi: 10.1016/S0024-3841(03)00016-0 google scholar
• Gunter, T. C., Friederici, A. D., & Schriefers, H. (2000). Syntactic gender and semantic expectancy: ERPs reveal early autonomy and late interaction. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(4), 55668. doi: 10.1162/089892900562336 google scholar
• Güneş, G. (2013). On the role of prosodic constituency in Turkish. In U. Özge (Ed.), Proceedings of the WAFL8 MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. Cambridge, MA. google scholar
• Güneş, G. (2014). Constraints on syntax-prosody correspondence: The clausal and subclausal parentheticals in Turkish. Lingua, 150, 278-314. doi: 10.1016/j.lingua.2014.07.021 google scholar
• Hagoort, P., Brown, C.M., & Groothusen, J. (1993). The syntactic positive shift as an ERP measure of sentenceprocessing. Language & Cognitive Processes, 8, 439-483.doi:10.1080/01690969308407585 google scholar
• Hagoort, P., Brown, C.M., & Osterhout, L. (1999). The neurocognition of syntactic processing. In C.M. Brown, & P. Hagoort (Eds.), The neurocognition of language (pp. 273-316). Oxford: Oxford University Press. google scholar
• Honbolygo, F., Török, Â., Banreti, Z., Hunyadi, L., & Csepe, V (2016). ERP correlates of prosody and syntax interaction in case of embedded sentences. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 37, 22-33. doi: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2015.08.001 google scholar
• Hopf, J. M., Bayer, J., Bader, M., & Meng, M. (1998). Event-related brain potentials and case information in syntactic ambiguities. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 264-280. doi: 10.1162/089892998562690 google scholar
• Hruska, C., & Alter, K. (2004). How prosody can influence sentence perception. In A. Steube (Ed.), Information structure: Theoretical and Empirical Aspects (pp. 211-226). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. google scholar
• Hruska, C., Alter, K., Steinhauer, K., & Steube, A. (2001). Misleading dialogs: Human’s brain reaction to prosodic information. In C. Cave, I. Guaitella, & S. Santi (Eds.), Orality and Gestures (pp. 425-430). Paris: L’Hartmattan. google scholar
• Hwang, H., & Steinhauer, K. (2011). Phrase length matters: The interplay between implicit prosody and syntax in Korean ‘garden path’ sentences. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 3555-3575. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_00001 google scholar
• Itzhak, I., Pauker, E., Drury, J. E., Baum, S. R., & Steinhauer, K. (2010). Event-related potentials show online influence of lexical biases on prosodic processing. Neuroreport, 21, 8-13. doi: 10.1097/ WNR.0b013e328330251d google scholar
• İşsever, S. (2000). Türkçede bilgi yapısı. (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation). Ankara University. google scholar
• İşsever, S. (2007). Towards a unified account of clause-initial scrambling in Turkish: A feature analysis. Turkic Languages, 11(1), 93-123. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag. google scholar
• İşsever, S. (2008). EPP-driven scrambling and Turkish, In Kurebito, T. (Ed.), Ambiguity of Morphological and Syntactic Analyses. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Research Institute for Languages of Asia and Africa [ILCAA]) Press. google scholar
• Kaan, E., Harris, A., Gibson, E., & Holcomb, P. J. (2000). The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 159-201. doi: 10.1080/016909600386084 google scholar
• Kaan,E.,&Swaab,T.Y.(2003).Repair,revision,andcomplexityinsyntacticanalysis:Anelectrophysiological differentiation. Journal of Neuroscience, 15(1), 98-110. doi: 10.1162/089892903321107855 google scholar
• Kabak, B. (2011). Turkish vowel harmony. In M. van Oostendorp, C.J. Ewen, E. Hume, & K. Rice (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology (pp. 1-24). Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. doi: 10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0118 google scholar
• Kabak, B., & Revithiodou, A. (2009). An interface approach to prosodic word recursion. In J. Grijzenhout, & B. Kabak (Eds.), Phonological domains: Universals and deviations (pp. 105-133). Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. google scholar
• Kahraman, B. (2013). Word order preferences of ditransitives in Turkish. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 67, 175-180. google scholar
• Kahraman, B., & Hirose, Y. (2018). Online comprehension of SOV and OSV sentences in Turkish with a supporting context. In T. Levin, & R. Masuda (Eds.), The Proceedings of 10th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 87. Cambridge, MA. google scholar
• Kahraman, B., Sato, A, & Sakai, H. (2010). Processing two types of ditransitive sentences in Turkish: Preliminary results from a self-paced reading study. Technical Report of IEICE, 110, 37-42. google scholar
• Kan, S. (2009). Prosodic domains and the syntax-prosody mapping in Turkish. (Unpublished Master Thesis). Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. google scholar
• Kelepir, M. (2001). Topics in Turkish syntax: Clausal structure and scope (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. google scholar
• Kerkhofs, R., Vonk, W., Schriefers, H., & Chwilla, D. J. (2007). Discourse, syntax, and prosody: The brain reveals an immediate interaction. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1421-1434. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2007.19.9.1421 google scholar
• Kornfilt, J. (2003). Scrambling, sub-scrambling and case in Turkish. In S. Karimi (Ed.), Word Order and Scrambling (pp. 125-155). Oxford: Blackwell. google scholar
• Kornfilt, J. (2005). Asymmetries between pre-verbal and post-verbal scrambling in Turkish, In J. Sabel, & M. Saito (Eds.), The Free Word Order Phenomenon: It’s Syntactic Sources and Diversity (pp. 163-180). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. google scholar
• Kural, M. (1992). Properties of scrambling in Turkish. (Unpublished Master Thesis). University of California, Los Angeles. google scholar
• Kural, M. (1997). Post-verbal constituents in Turkish and the linear correspondence axiom. Linguistic Inquiry, 28(3), 498-519. google scholar
• Kutas, M., & Hillyard, S. A. (1980). Event-related brain potentials to semantically inappropriate and surprisingly large words. Biological Psychology, 11, 99-116. doi: 10.1016/0301-0511(80)90046-0 google scholar
• Kühn, J. (2013). Towards Focus Typology in Turkish. In M. Oliveira Jr. (Ed.), IV Coloquio Brasileiro De Prosodia Da Fala, 2. Maceio: Universidade Federal de Alagoas. google scholar
• Li, W., & Jang, Y. (2009). Perception of prosodic hierarchical boundaries in Mandarin Chinese sentences. Neuroscience, 158, 1416-1425. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2008.10.065 google scholar
• MacWhinney, B., Osman-Sagi, J., & Slobin, D. I. (1991). Sentence comprehension in aphasia in two clear case-marking languages. Brain and Language, 41, 234-249. doi: 10.1016/0093-934X(91)90154-S google scholar
• Magne, C., Astesano, C., Lacharet-Dujour, A., Morel, M., Alter, K., & Besson, M. (2005). On-line Processing of “Pop-Out” Words in spoken French Dialogues. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17(5), 740-756. doi: 10.1162/0898929053747667 google scholar
• Mannel, C., & Friederici, A. D. (2009). Pauses and Intonational Phrasing: ERP Studies in 5 month-old German Infants and Adults. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(10), 1988-2006. doi: 10.1162/ jocn.2009.21221 google scholar
• Maviş, İ., Arslan, S., & Aydın, Ö. (2019). Comprehension of word order in Turkish aphasia. Aphasiology, 1-17. doi: 10.1080/02687038.2019.1622646 google scholar
• Meyer, M., Alter, K., Friederici, A.D., Lohmann, G., & von Cramon, D.Y. (2002). FMRI reveals brain regions mediating slow prosodic manipulations in spoken sentences. Human Brain Mapping, 17(2), 73-88. doi: 10.1002/hbm.10042 google scholar
• Nalçacı, E., Kalaycıoğlu, C., Güneş, E., & Çiçek, M. (2002). El tercihi anketinin geçerlik ve güvenilirliği. Journal of Turkish Psychiatry, 13(2), 99-106. google scholar
• Osterhout, L., & Holcomb, L. (1992). Event-related potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 785-806. doi: 10.1016/0749-596X(92)90039-Z google scholar
• Özge, U. (2003). A tune-based account of Turkish information structure. (Unpublished Master Thesis). Middle East Technical University. google scholar
• Özge, U., & Bozşahin, C. (2010). Intonation in the grammar of Turkish. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 35, 73-97. doi: 10.1016/j.lingua.2009.05.001 google scholar
• Özge, D., Küntay, A., & Snedeker, J. (2019). Why wait for the verb? Turkish speaking children use case markers for incremental language comprehension. Cognition, 183, 152-180. doi:10.1016/j. cognition.2018.10.026 google scholar
• Özge, D., Marinis, T., Zeyrek, D., & Özge, U. (2013). Object-first orders in Turkish do not pose a challenge during processing. In U. Özge (Ed.), Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics (67) (pp. 269-280). MIT, Cambridge. google scholar
• Pannekamp, A., Toepel, U., Alter, K., Hahne, A., & Friederici, A. D. (2005). Prosody-driven sentence processing: an event-related brain potential study. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 17(3), 407421. doi: 10.1162/0898929053279450 google scholar
• Pauker, E., Itzhak, I., Baum, S. R., & Steinhauer, K. (2011). Effects of cooperating and conflicting prosody in spoken English garden path sentences: ERP evidence for the boundary deletion hypothesis. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 2731-2751. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2011.21610 google scholar
• Qi, Z., Beach, S. D., Finn, A. S., Minas, J., Goetz, C., Chan, B., & Gabriel, J. D. E. (2017). Native-language N400 and P600 predict dissociable language-learning abilities in adults. Neuropsychologia, 98, 177-191. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.10.005 google scholar
• Sammler, D., Grosbras, M. H., Anwander, A., Bestelmeyer, P. E. G., & Belin, P. (2015). Dorsal and ventral pathways for prosody. Current Biology, 25(23), 3079-3085. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.10.009 google scholar
• Slobin, D., & Bever, T. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: A cross-linguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition, 12(3), 229-265. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(82)90033-6 google scholar
• Steinhauer, K. (2003). Electrophysiological correlates of prosody and punctuation. Brain and Language, 86, 142-164. doi: 10.1016/S0093-934X(02)00542-4 google scholar
• Steinhauer, K., Alter, K., & Friederici, A. D. (1999). Brain potentials indicate immediate use of prosodic cues in natural speech processing. Nature America, 2, 191-196. doi: 10.1038/5757 google scholar
• Toepel, U., Pannekamp, A., & Alter, K. (2007). Catching the news: Processing strategies in listening to dialog as measured by ERPs. Journal of Behavioral and Brain Functions, 3, 53. doi: 10.1186/1744-9081-3-53 google scholar
• Ueno, M., & Kluender, R. (2003). On the processing of Japanese wh-questions: Relating grammar and brain. In G. Garding, & M. Tsujimura (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Second West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 491-504). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. google scholar
• Uzun, İ.P., Arslan, S., & Aydın, Ö. (2020). What eye movements during silent reading can tell us about pre-verbal focus in Turkish? [Poster presentation] Laboratory Phonology Conference (LabPhon17). University of British Columbia. Vancouver, Canada. google scholar
• Wolff, S., Schlesewsky, M., Hirotani, M., & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. (2008). The neural mechanisms of word order processing revisited: Electrophysiological evidence from Japanese. Brain and Language, 107, 133-157. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2008.06.003 google scholar