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Chapter 7: Prosody
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Two main kinds of prosody:
emotional
linguistic.
A comprehensive model of the neural substrates of prosody has not yet been developed.
However, two main proposals have been made about one of the key issues—namely, cerebral lateralization:
Proposal #1: The key factor involves acoustic features:
right-lateralized:
long duration
pitch variation
left-lateralized:
short duration
temporal variation.
Proposal #2: The key factor involves functional features:
emotional prosody
linguistic prosody.
Each proposal has received some support, but neither one can account for all the data.
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1. Emotional Prosody
1.1. Perception
The Right Mid to Anterior Superior Temporal Cortex—Auditory Integration
Stimuli: sentences with emotional meanings produced in two ways:
by actors who used appropriate prosody
by Kali, a software program that builds expressions out of naturally spoken syllables but lacks emotional prosody.
Contrast: The actor condition MINUS the Kali condition.
The cluster of activation included the human voice-sensitive area (circles).
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1. Emotional Prosody
1.1. Perception
The Right Mid to Anterior Superior Temporal Cortex—Auditory Integration
Receives input from early auditory areas.
Sensitive to the combination of multiple prosodic parameters:
stimulus duration
mean intensity
mean pitch
pitch variability.
Engaged by the emotional prosody of utterances even when listeners concentrate on other aspects of the stimuli, such as the semantic content, whether the speaker is male or female, or whether the sounds are presented to the right or left ear. This suggests that the region integrates prosodic information automatically.
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5. 1. Emotional Prosody 1.1. Perception
The Amygdala—Relevance Detection
Mixed findings:
Evidence for involvement in perceiving emotional prosody:
Activated in many fMRI studies.
Damage can disrupt recognition.
Evidence against involvement in perceiving emotional prosody:
Not activated in some fMRI studies.
Damage does not always disrupt recognition.
A more nuanced approach:
Recent work suggests that the responsiveness of the amygdala to different tones of voice depends on the following factors:
subjective relevance, i.e., how much the listener cares about other people
contextual novelty, i.e., the degree to which the prosodic pattern is expected
acoustic salience, i.e., how clearly the prosodic pattern stands out.
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6. 1. Emotional Prosody 1.1. Perception
The Right Ventral Frontoparietal Cortex—Emotion Simulation
Analyzed behavioral and lesion data for 66 patients.
Patients rated the degree to which the intonation of utterances expressed each of five types of emotion:
happy
sad
angry
afraid
Surprised.
Patients were divided into two subgroups on the basis of their performance:
low-scoring (bottom half, N=33)
high-scoring (top half, N=33).
The lesion sites of the high-scoring subgroup were subtracted from those of the low-scoring subgroup, and three main regions of damage were found:
right mid to anterior superior temporal
bilateral orbitofrontal and inferior frontal
right ventral frontoparietal.
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1. Emotional Prosody
1.1. Perception
Summary
Right mid to anterior superior temporal cortex—auditory integration.
Amygdalae—relevance detection.
Right ventral frontoparietal region—emotion simulation.
Basal ganglia—emotion simulation, sequence decoding, and/or response triggering.
Bilateral orbitofrontal and inferior frontal cortices—cognitive evaluation.
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1. Emotional Prosody
1.2. Production
Right Hemisphere
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1. Emotional Prosody
1.2. Production
Left Hemisphere
Task: Repetition of prosodic patterns carried by:
“I’m going to the other movie”
“ba ba ba ba ba ba”
“aaaaaahhhh.”
Patients with right brain damage (RBD) were consistently impaired.
But patients with left brain damage (LBD) performed increasingly better across the conditions.
Suggests that the left hemisphere may be more sensitive to verbal-articulatory demands than to emotional prosody per se.
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1. Emotional Prosody
1.2. Production
Basal Ganglia
Case study of a patient with bilateral basal ganglia damage.
Elicitation task: Produce semantically neutral sentences with angry, happy, sad, or surprised intonation.
Repetition task: Copy the examiner’s renditions of the same sentences with the same intonation patterns.
Listeners subjectively rated the “goodness” of each emotion type, and tried to objectively identify each emotion type.
Note also Parkinson’s disease.
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2. Linguistic Prosody
2.1. Perception
Three main domains of linguistic prosody:
Syntactic:
Sam is going to the party too
Sam is going to the party too?
The boy said, “The girl is cute”
The boy, said the girl, is cute
Lexical:
object vs. object
green house vs. greenhouse
I like the big dog, not the little one
Tonal:
ma (high level tone) = “mother”
ma (rising tone) = “numb,” “numbness,” “hemp,” or “cannabis”
ma (falling-rising) = “horse”
ma (falling tone) = “scold”
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12. 2. Linguistic Prosody 2.1. Perception Syntactic Domain
The anterior superior temporal region (STR) was engaged bilaterally not only during the perception of normal speech, but also during the perception of pseudo speech (no real content words) and degraded speech (no segmental, lexical, or syntactic cues). This could reflect prosodic processing.
In addition, for pseudo speech and degraded speech, but not for normal speech, there was activation in several frontal areas bilaterally. This could reflect effortful top-down processing.
Lesion studies support the view that the perception of prosodic cues for declarative/interrogative mood is subserved bilaterally. But there may be a mild RH bias, since patients with RBD are worse than patients with LBD at understanding filtered utterances.
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2. Linguistic Prosody
2.1. Perception
Syntactic Domain
Examples of sentences with (a) one or (b) two intonational phrase boundaries (#):
(a) Peter verspricht Anna zu arbeiten # und das Büro zu putzen.
(Peter promises Anna to work and to clean the office.)
(b) Peter verspricht # Anna zu erlasten # und das Büro zu putzen.
(Peter promises to support Anna and to clean the office.)
Condition with two intonational phrase boundaries MINUS condition with one intonational phrase boundary = bilateral mid superior temporal activation for natural sentences, but just left mid superior temporal activation for hummed sentences.
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2. Linguistic Prosody
2.1. Perception
Tonal Domain
Wong et al. (2004)
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2. Linguistic Prosody
2.1. Perception
Tonal Domain
Wong et al. (2004)
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2. Linguistic Prosody
2.1. Perception
Tonal Domain
Discrimination task involving:
Chinese words (CC), in which Chinese tones were super-imposed on Chinese syllables
tonal chimeras (CT), in which Thai tones were superimposed on Chinese syllables.
Contrasts to identify regions most responsive to native tones:
Chinese group: CC>CT
Thai group: CT>CC
Overlapping activation for both contrasts was found in the left planum temporale.
This region displayed a double dissociation:
Chinese group: Stronger response to Chinese than Thai tones
Thai group: Stronger response to Thai than Chinese tones.
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2. Linguistic Prosody
2.1. Perception
Tonal Domain
Neuropsychological studies support left-hemisphere dominance for linguistic tone perception.
The size of the left primary auditory cortex may even be relevant.
There is also evidence that experience perceiving linguistic tones modifies the brainstem.
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2. Linguistic Prosody
2.1. Perception
Summary
Prosodic perception in the syntactic domain appears to be bilateral, with the following caveats:
mild RH bias for declarative/interrogative distinctions
mild LH bias for intonational phrase boundaries.
Prosodic perception in the lexical domain appears to be governed primarily by the LH.
Prosodic perception in the tonal domain appears to be governed primarily by the LH.
Acoustic considerations can explain most of these patterns of hemispheric asymmetry.
But functional considerations must be invoked to explain why linguistic tone perception is strongly left-lateralized whereas non-linguistic tone perception is strongly right-lateralized.
The basal ganglia may also contribute to the perception of linguistic prosody.
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2. Linguistic Prosody
2.2. Production
Prosodic production in the syntactic domain appears to be bilateral.
Prosodic production in the lexical domain appears to be governed primarily by the LH.
Prosodic production in the tonal domain appears to be governed primarily by the LH.
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