My research investigates the neurophysiological underpinnings of spoken language processing, with particular focus on predictive mechanisms. Having completed my doctoral studies at Lund University in 2017, I am currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, supported by the Swedish Research Council, in collaboration with Professor Anne Cutler.

My thesis project investigated the way in which prosody is processed in the brain, with a particular focus on the Swedish word accents, as well as sentence-level phenomena known as ’left-edge boundary tones’. It was found that listeners take advantage of prosody to anticipate what is coming up, both within words and at the sentence level.

There are two word accents in Swedish: ‘accent 1’ and ‘accent 2’. In Central Swedish, accent 1 is realised as a low tone on the stressed vowel of a word, while accent 2 is realised as a high tone. Each Swedish word has a word accent and there is a productive tone-grammar association between suffixes and word accents. For example, the singular noun suffix -en attached to a word stem means that the stem will be associated with accent 1 (e.g. 'båten', 'the boat'), while the plural suffix -ar is associated with accent 2 ('båtar', 'boats'). Consequently, word accents lend themselves well to the study of prediction of grammatical structures. Similarly, sentence-level boundary tones are used by Swedish listeners to anticipate upcoming sentence structure. The association between prosody and morphology/syntax thus allows us to look more closely at how structural cues can lead to the pre-activation of material in language processing.

In my thesis project, I identified a brain signal – the pre-activation negativity (PrAN) – which is tied to the certainty with which upcoming information can be anticipated. My postdoctoral research at the MARCS Institute aims to expand on and use previous findings to further investigate rapid brain responses to spoken language.

Books (1)

• Söderström, P. (2017). Prosody and Prediction in Neural Speech Processing. Lund University : Centre for Languages and Literature. Dissertation.

Articles (10)

• Söderström, P., Horne, M., Mannfolk, P., van Westen, D. & Roll, M. (2018). Rapid syntactic pre-activation in Broca’s area : Concurrent electrophysiological and haemodynamic recordings. Brain Research, 1697, 76-82. Elsevier.
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• Schremm, A., Novén, M., Horne, M., Söderström, P., van Westen, D. & Roll, M. (2018). Cortical thickness of planum temporale and pars opercularis in native language tone processing. Brain and Language, 176, 42-47. Academic Press.
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• Roll, M., Söderström, P., Frid, J., Mannfolk, P. & Horne, M. (2017). Forehearing words : Pre-activation of word endings at word onset. Neuroscience Letters, 658, 57-61. Elsevier.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2017). Stem tones pre-activate suffixes in the brain. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 46, 271-280. Springer.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M., Mannfolk, P., van Westen, D. & Roll, M. (2017). Tone-grammar association within words: Concurrent ERP and fMRI show rapid neural pre-activation and involvement of left inferior frontal gyrus in pseudoword processing. Brain and Language, 174, 119-126. Academic Press.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M., Frid, J. & Roll, M. (2016). Pre-activation negativity (PrAN) in brain potentials to unfolding words. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10. Frontiers.
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• Schremm, A., Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2016). Implicit acquisition of tone-suffix connections in L2 learners of Swedish. The Mental Lexicon, 11, 55-75. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
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• Roll, M., Söderström, P., Mannfolk, P., Shtyrov, Y., Johansson, M., van Westen, D. & Horne, M. (2015). Word tones cueing morphosyntactic structure: Neuroanatomical substrates and activation time-course assessed by EEG and fMRI. Brain and Language, 150, 14-21. Academic Press.
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• Roll, M., Söderström, P. & Horne, M. (2013). Word-stem tones cue suffixes in the brain. Brain Research, 1520, 116-120. Elsevier.
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• Söderström, P., Roll, M. & Horne, M. (2012). Processing morphologically conditioned word accents. The Mental Lexicon, 7, 77-89. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Conference contributions (16)

• Lovcevic, I., Söderström, P., Kalashnikova, M., Mahajan, Y. & Burnham, D. (2019). Neural processing of hyper-and hypo-articulated vowels in Infant-Directed Speech.
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• Roll, M., Söderström, P. & Horne, M. (2019). Pre-activation negativity (PrAN): A neural index of predictive strength of phonological cues.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2018). The role of segmental and suprasegmental information in word-level and sentence-level predictions.
• Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2017). Predicting word endings and syntactic structures with prosodic cues – the pre-activation negativity.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2017). Tonal triggers to word-level and sentence-level predictions.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2017). Tonal triggers to word-level and sentence-level predictions.
• Söderström, P., Horne, M., Mannfolk, P., van Westen, D. & Roll, M. (2017). Anticipating morphological and syntactic structures : investigating the pre-activation negativity.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2016). Lexical frequency effects on word accent processing in Swedish.
• Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2016). Word accents and phonological neighbourhood as predictive cues in spoken language comprehension.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M., Frid, J. & Roll, M. (2016). A brain potential signalling linguistic pre-activation? : an analysis of the pre-activation negativity (PrAN).
• Roll, M., Söderström, P. & Horne, M. (2015). A brain network for integration of tone and suffix. [Publication information missing], 140-140.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M. & Roll, M. (2015). Using tonal cues to predict inflections. In Svensson Lundmark, M., Ambrazaitis, G. & van de Weijer, J. (Eds.) Working Papers (pp. 91-94), 55. Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University.
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• Söderström, P., Horne, M., Mannfolk, P., Shtyrov, Y., Johansson, M. & Roll, M. (2014). Prosody provides cues to morphosyntactic structure : an EEG-fMRI study of neural networks subserving Swedish word tone processing. [Publication information missing], 166-166.
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• Söderström, P., Roll, M. & Horne, M. (2013). Effects of Task on the Processing of Swedish Word Accents: A Reaction Time and Response Time Study. In Asu, E. L. & Lippus, P. (Eds.) Nordic Prosody: proceedings of the XIth conference (pp. 353-362). Peter Lang Publishing Group.
• Roll, M., Söderström, P. & Horne, M. (2011). Phonetic markedness, turning points, and anticipatory attention. Fonetik 2011: Speech, Music and Hearing Quarterly Progress and Status Report, 51, 113-116.
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• Roll, M., Söderström, P. & Horne, M. (2011). The marked status of Accent 2 in Central Swedish. Proceedings from ICPhS 2011, 1710-1713.
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