Concurrent processing of the prosodic hierarchy is supported by cortical entrainment and phase-amplitude coupling.

Abstract

Models of phonology posit a hierarchy of prosodic units that is relatively independent from syntactic structure, requiring its own parsing. It remains unexplored how this prosodic hierarchy is represented in the brain. We investigated this foundational question by means of an electroencephalography (EEG) study. Thirty young adults listened to German sentences containing manipulations at different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Evaluating speech-to-brain cortical entrainment and phase-amplitude coupling revealed that prosody's hierarchical structure is maintained at the neural level during spoken language comprehension. The faithfulness of this tracking varied as a function of the hierarchy's degree of intactness as well as systematic interindividual differences in audio-motor synchronization abilities. The results underscore the role of complex oscillatory mechanisms in configuring the continuous and hierarchical nature of the speech signal and situate prosody as a structure indispensable from theoretical perspectives on spoken language comprehension in the brain.