Prosodic focus marking in Turkish: An electrophysiological study

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.