Brain Networks of Emotional Prosody Processing in a Foreign Language Versus Mother Tongue

Abstract

Increased interest in the relationships between the brain and behavior over the past several decades has made brain network process of emotional prosody a topic of study in disciplines like neurology, psychiatry, neurolinguistics and neuroscience. Because emotional prosody has a key role to implication of timbre component, mood sense, and prosodic content. Also, it serves a highly important function for sense, the meaning to be reflected, and ability to provide effective communication. Therefore, the knowledge of how the emotional prosody sequence works in the brain will contribute to both language development and foreign language teaching as well as clinical evaluation of individuals with verbal communication difficulty. In the literature, neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies about investigating emotional prosody have produced controversial results in specifying similarities versus differences mother tongue acquisition and foreign learning neural networks. For this reason, this review study takes an interdisciplinary perspective to identify the neural networks of emotional prosody in mother tongue and foreign language learning process with different imaging modalities.