Good, bad and ugly word stress – fMRI evidence for foot structure driven processing of prosodic violations

Using a stress violation paradigm, we investigated whether metrical feet constrain the way prosodic patterns are processed and evaluated.Processing of correctly versus incorrectly stressed words was associated with activation in left posterior angular and retrosplenial cortex, indicating the recognition of an expected and familiar pattern, whereas the inverse contrast yielded enhanced bilateral activation in the superior temporal gyrus, reflecting higher costs in auditory (re-)analysis. More fine-grained analyses of severe versus mild stress violations revealed activations of the left superior temporal and left anterior angular gyrus whereas the opposite contrast led to frontal activations including Broca’s area and its right-hemisphere homologue, suggesting that detection of mild violations lead to increased effort in working memory and deeper phonological processing.Our results provide first evidence that different incorrect stress patterns are processed in a qualitatively different way and that the underlying foot structure seems to determine potential stress positions in German words.

► Correct word stress show activation of left post. AG and RSC indicating recognition of expected pattern.
► Incorrect word stress show bilateral STG activation reflecting higher costs in auditory analysis.
► Severe stress violation revealed activations of the left STG and anterior AG.
► Mild stress violation led to BA 44/45 activation and its homologue, more WM load and deeper phonol processing.
► Stress violations in German are processed in qualitatively different way depending on foot structure.