Closure Positive Shifts Evoked by Different Prosodic Boundaries in Chinese Sentences

Abstract

Spoken language is structured into phrases. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used in this study investigating the perception of prosodic hierarchical boundaries. It was found that the closure positive shift (CPS) can be evoked by phonological phrase boundaries and intonational phrase boundaries respectively; the CPSs are different in onset and peak latency. The deflection elicited by prosodic word boundaries is more positive compared with the one elicited by syllable boundaries.