Prosodic phrase priming during listening to Chinese ambiguous phrases in different experimental tasks

Using the structural priming paradigm, the present study investigates prosodic phrase priming with ERPs (event-related potentials). Participants listened to 2 consecutive Chinese ambiguous phrases that can be analyzed as a modifier-noun construction or as a narrative-object structure in both lexical judgment and structural judgment tasks. The results indicated that prosodic boundaries embedded in ambiguous phrases stably elicited the Closure Positive Shift (CPS). More importantly, the prosodic priming effect occurs, as evidenced by the fact that the amplitude of the CPS elicited by the target phrases was lower than that of the CPS elicited by the prime phrases. In addition, the priming effect was stronger in the structural judgment task than in the lexical judgment task. This result may suggest that prosodic priming was facilitated when the listener's attention was directed to the prosodic aspect and that under such circumstances listeners process the prosodic boundary deeply. In conclusion, prosodic phrase structures are formulated in the brain and modulate the processing of the immediately subsequent item during speech comprehension, and this process is influenced by the type of task being performed.