Abstract
How listeners handle prosodic cues of linguistic and paralinguistic origin is a central question for spoken communication. In the present EEG study, we addressed this question by examining neural responses to variations in pitch accent (linguistic) and affective (paralinguistic) prosody in Swedish words, using a passive auditory oddball paradigm. The results indicated that changes in pitch accent and affective prosody elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) responses at around 200 ms, confirming the brain’s pre-attentive response to any prosodic modulation. The MMN amplitude was, however, statistically larger to the deviation in affective prosody in comparison to the deviation in pitch accent and affective prosody combined, which is in line with previous research indicating not only a larger MMN response to affective prosody in comparison to neutral prosody but also a smaller MMN response to multidimensional deviants than unidimensional ones. The results, further, showed a significant P3a response to the affective prosody change in comparison to the pitch accent change at around 300 ms, in accordance with previous findings showing an enhanced positive response to emotional stimuli. The present findings provide evidence for distinct neural processing of different prosodic cues, and statistically confirm the intrinsic perceptual and motivational salience of paralinguistic information in spoken communication.
Highlights
Variations in prosodic features, such as duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency (f 0), are crucial for spoken communication both at the linguistic and paralinguistic levels
The present study adds on previous work by examining neural activity associated with Swedish pitch accents and affective prosody using the electroencephalography (EEG) technique and the mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a components of eventrelated potentials (ERPs)
The present paper investigated the perception of prosodic modulations of linguistic and affective origin as shown by differences in ERP changes
Summary
Variations in prosodic features, such as duration, intensity, and fundamental frequency (f 0), are crucial for spoken communication both at the linguistic and paralinguistic levels. Swedish has for instance two distinctive linguistic prosodic patterns, pitch accents 1 and 2, which are primarily associated with the timing of f 0, and these accent patterns (indicated with superscripts) occasionally generate lexically distinct minimal pairs as in anden1 “the duck” and anden2 “the ghost” (Bruce, 2007; Riad, 2014) Paralinguistic information such as vocal affect is effectively communicated by prosodic modulations; sadness is typically associated with decreased f 0 and intensity levels, whereas anger is characterized with increased f 0 and intensity levels (Scherer, 1986; Banse and Scherer, 1996; Juslin and Laukka, 2001, 2003). By investigating the interpretation and integration of linguistic and paralinguistic prosody preattentively and in a well-balanced paradigm, the present paper is believed to give a better insight into how the brain codes and processes diverse communicative functions being rooted in the same acoustic features, and provide a deeper understanding of the symbiotic relationship between functionally different cues during spoken communication
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