Event-Related Potential Evidence of Implicit Metric Structure during Silent Reading

Abstract

Under the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, readers generate prosodic structures during silent reading that can direct their real-time interpretations of the text. In the current study, we investigated the processing of implicit meter by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants read a series of 160 rhyming couplets, where the rhyme target was always a stress-alternating noun−verb homograph (e.g., permit, which is pronounced PERmit as a noun and perMIT as a verb). The target had a strong−weak or weak−strong stress pattern, which was either consistent or inconsistent with the stress expectation generated by the couplet. Inconsistent strong−weak targets elicited negativities between 80−155 ms and 325−375 ms relative to consistent strong−weak targets; inconsistent weak−strong targets elicited a positivity between 365−435 ms relative to consistent weak−strong targets. These results are largely consistent with effects of metric violations during listening, demonstrating that implicit prosodic representations are similar to explicit prosodic representations.

Keywords

• implicit prosody
• reading
• meter
• rhythm
• lexical stress
• event-related potentials
• poetry