"Development of an EEG paradigm with rhythmic syllable-by-syllable presentation of sentence sequences"

The phenomenon of brainwave entrainment means the brain, by analyzing the rhythm, responds to stimuli with frequencies matching the pattern presented. In this thesis I deal with entrainment and linguistic structures, specifically syllables, phrases and sentences, aiming to investigate whether the brain works with a hierarchical processing. The paradigm is an adaptation of the studies of Ding et al. (2016) and Ding, Melloni, Yang, et al. (2017) using Italian language, which requires a more complex experimental design: the stimuli are presented syllable-by-syllable with a standard rhythm and the EEG records the brain response. Entrainment to words in sentences have been originally interpreted as a sign of structural operations, however Frank and Christiansen (2018) showed with a computational model that the data can also be explained in terms of entrainment to lexical properties of single words. In our paradigm we profit of the word order flexibility of Italian language to try to disentangle the two explanations.