Abstract
Prosodic cues in speech are indispensable for comprehending a speaker’s message, recognizing emphasis and emotion, parsing segmental units, and disambiguating syntactic structures. While it is commonly accepted that prosody provides a fundamental service to higher-level features of speech, the neural underpinnings of prosody processing are not clearly defined in the cognitive neuroscience literature. Many recent electrophysiological studies have examined speech comprehension by measuring neural entrainment to the speech amplitude envelope, using a variety of methods including phase-locking algorithms and stimulus reconstruction. Here we review recent evidence for neural tracking of the speech envelope and demonstrate the importance of prosodic contributions to the neural tracking of speech. Prosodic cues may offer a foundation for supporting neural synchronization to the speech envelope, which scaffolds linguistic processing. We argue that prosody has an inherent role in speech perception, and future research should fill the gap in our knowledge of how prosody contributes to speech envelope entrainment.
Highlights
The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, Vanderbilt University, 1801 Edgehill Avenue, Nashville, TN 37212, USA
Prosody is determined by a series of acoustic correlates—duration, amplitude, and fundamental frequency—which can be represented in a number of ways, including the amplitude modulation (AM) envelope [30,31]
Because the amplitude envelope captures suprasegmental features across the speech signal, it lends itself to being an excellent proxy for prosodic information, and we argue that studies that use the speech envelope are inherently targeting a response to prosody
Summary
Intonation, and rhythm of speech, which provides suprasegmental linguistic features across phonemes, syllables, and phrases [1,2,3]. Prosodic fluctuations are responsible for communicating a wealth of information, primarily through acoustic correlates such as duration, amplitude, and fundamental frequency As any of these parameters changes, it influences the expression of stress, intonation, and rhythm of the spoken message [21,22]. The modified prosodic qualities of infant-directed speech make the signal acoustically salient and engaging for infants [23,27], which yield later linguistic benefits such as boosts in vocabulary acquisition [28] and accessing syntactic structures [29]. This is one example of how prosody plays an important role in speech communication. It is our hope to draw attention to the role of prosody processing in neural entrainment to speech and to encourage researchers to examine the neural underpinnings of prosodic processing
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