Syntactic Prosody

PI Name: Scott K Holland,PhD

Email: Scott.Holland@cchmc.org

Areas: Bilateral STG and POT

Program: Mac Stim

Durations: 6 min. 45 sec

Special Equipment: Headphones, 2 buttons for response

Description: A target sentence is presented, clearly read in a female voice. This target sentence is followed by a series of 9 or 10 sentences that have been low-pass filtered with 100 Hz cut-off so that individual words cannot be recognized; however, the syntactic prosody of the sentence is preserved. Subjects are trained to recognize the target sentence among the foils based exclusively on the syntactic prosody of the sentence. They are instructed to press a button each time they recognize the target sentence. All sentences are drawn from the Story Processing task, described below. Each stimulus block of target and filtered sentences has a duration of 45 seconds, allowing 15 seconds for presentation and identification of target sentence. Five stimulus blocks are interleaved with control blocks lasting 30 seconds each.