Entrainment to speech prosody influences subsequent sentence comprehension

Abstract

Speech processing is subserved by neural oscillations. Through a mechanism termed entrainment, oscillations can maintain speech rhythms beyond speech offset. We here tested whether entrainment affects higher-level language comprehension. We conducted four online experiments on 80 participants each. Our paradigm combined acoustic entrainment to repetitive prosodic contours with subsequent visual presentation of ambiguous target sentences (e.g. “Max sees Tom and Karl laughs”). We aimed to elicit faulty segmentations through the duration of the preceding contour (e.g. the segment “Max sees Tom and Karl” leads to an error at “laughs”). Across experiments, self-paced reading data showed that participants employed the duration of the initial prosodic contour to predict the duration of the upcoming segments. Prosody entrainment may thus serve a predictive function during language comprehension, not only helping the reader to segment the current speech input, but also inducing temporal predictions about upcoming segments.