Exploring How Our Brains Handle Emphasis in Language

Imagine you are having a conversation with a friend about your weekend plans. You might say, “I really want to go hiking,” emphasising the word “really” to show how much you are looking forward to it. This everyday use of emphasis helps convey your feelings and priorities. But have you ever wondered how our brains process this emphasis, or focus, in different languages?

Professor Niels O. SCHILLER, Head of the Department of Linguistics and Translation (LT) at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK), and Professor Ashley LEWIS, Assistant Professor of LT, have been involved in research that explored how our brains handle emphasis in sentences and whether the processing of focus is universally similar. The study delves into how emphasis marking affects language processing in the Bantu language Makhuwa-Enahara, spoken in northern Mozambique. It found that Makhuwa-Enahara marks focus using verb conjugation instead of changes in tone or rhythm. This creates a common pattern: focus marking increases the importance of the information being emphasised, no matter how it is expressed.

Many languages use stress or intonation to highlight certain words, making them stand out. Researchers wanted to see if our brains react similarly to emphasis, regardless of the language used. They measured brain activity (using EEG) while participants listened to sentences with and without emphasis on specific words. Some words were nonsensical in the context of the sentence (like saying “The bird ate a sun”).

A Distinct Brain Response
They found that when a word was emphasised, the brain showed a specific pattern (a “more negative N400 response”) compared to when the same word was not emphasised. This indicates that, regardless of the method used to mark focus, it enhances the processing of that information.

This suggests that even though languages express emphasis in different ways, our brains process emphasised information similarly across languages. In Schiller’s study, while the effect of nonsensical words was similar whether or not the word was emphasised, the act of emphasis itself still created a distinct brain response. The study also acknowledges that some limitations, like the participants having a relatively low educational background and their unfamiliarity with experimental research, might have influenced the results.

This study is a nice example of experimental research on under-researched languages in remote areas. There are more than 7,000 languages world-wide – however, most research is done on only a dozen different languages, mostly of Indo-European descent. Nevertheless, languages can differ quite dramatically, and these differences may also imply different underlying neuro-cognitive representations and processing strategies. Therefore, more research is needed on a more varied set of languages, including languages spoken in Asia and Africa, to better understand brain processing of language and communication in general.