Linguistic prosody perception in schizophrenia patients.

Recognition of basic affective prosody in children with autism spectrum conditions: A three-level meta-analysis based on emotional dimension theory.

ABSTRACTThe right hemisphere of the human brain plays an important role in music processing, with lateralized functions for pitch, meter, and melody recognition among other features. However, the relationship between white matter and music processing is relatively little explored. We report a case study of a 50‐year‐old musician with a right parieto‐insular brain tumor who underwent resective surgery. Post‐surgical diffusion tensor imaging revealed that the integrity of the right frontal aslant tract and the ventral pathway of the patient was preserved, whereas the right dorsal pathway (arcuate fasciculus and portions of parietal and insular cortex) was largely removed. A comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation revealed that the patient did not present language, receptive prosody, or cognitive deficits after the tumor removal, with the exception of a selective impairment in recognizing the emotion of fear in prosody. Moreover, the patient showed no signs of amusia, and did not report any problem with musical activities or music ‐related emotional processing. The only subjective report concerned rhythmic abilities. This case study suggests that the right dorsal stream does not subserve musical and receptive affective prosody processing, contributing to the ongoing debate of white matter correlates of these cognitive functions.

Linguistic and emotional prosody: A systematic review and ALE meta-analysis.

Affective voice signaling has significant biological and social relevance across various species, and different affective signaling types have emerged through the evolution of voice communication. These types range from basic affective voice bursts and nonverbal affective up to affective intonations superimposed on speech utterances in humans in the form of paraverbal prosodic patterns. These different types of affective signaling should have evolved to be acoustically and perceptually distinctive, allowing accurate and nuanced affective communication. It might be assumed that affect signaling is most effective and distinctive in affective prosody as the presumably most recently evolved form of acoustic voice signaling. We investigated and compared two signaling types in human voice communication with different evolutionary backgrounds, referred to as nonverbal affect signals (shared across many species) and affective prosody (being exclusive in humans). We found, first, that various basic affect categories seem to be distinctively encoded in both signal types, but there seems minimal continuity in the acoustic code from nonverbal affect signals to affective prosody and vice versa. Second, we found that decoding affective meaning seems considerably impaired from affective prosody. Many positive affect signals and especially vocal disgust showed extreme decoding impairments from affective prosody, with speech acoustics probably constraining affect encoding in prosody to a considerable degree. Only the recognizability of voice signals of threat seems to be largely preserved in affective prosody. In conclusion, it points to considerable discontinuities between nonverbal and paraverbal affect signals, which questions the evolutionary precursors of human affect signaling in voice communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Background/Objectives: Successful discourse relies not only on linguistic but also on prosodic information. Difficulty recognizing emotion conveyed through prosody (receptive affective aprosodia) following right hemisphere stroke (RHS) significantly disrupts communication participation and personal relationships. Growing evidence suggests that damage to white matter in addition to gray matter structures impairs affective prosody recognition. The current study investigates lesion-symptom associations in receptive affective aprosodia during RHS recovery by assessing whether disruptions in distinct white matter structures impact different underlying affective prosody recognition skills. Methods: Twenty-eight adults with RHS underwent neuroimaging and behavioral testing at acute, subacute, and chronic timepoints. Fifty-seven healthy matched controls completed the same behavioral testing, which comprised tasks targeting affective prosody recognition and underlying perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic skills. Linear mixed-effects models and multivariable linear regression were used to assess behavioral performance recovery and lesion-symptom associations. Results: Controls outperformed RHS participants on behavioral tasks earlier in recovery, and RHS participants' affective prosody recognition significantly improved from acute to chronic testing. Affective prosody and emotional facial expression recognition were affected by external capsule and inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus lesions while sagittal stratum lesions impacted prosodic feature recognition. Accessing semantic representations of emotions implicated the superior longitudinal fasciculus. Conclusions: These findings replicate previously observed associations between right white matter tracts and affective prosody recognition and further identify lesion-symptom associations of underlying prosodic recognition skills throughout recovery. Investigation into prosody's behavioral components and how they are affected by injury can help further intervention development and planning.

Attention is a fundamental cognitive process, and individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often experience challenges in both cognitive and emotional regulation. Although multiple object tracking (MOT) tasks are frequently used to assess attention impairments in ASD, most studies focus solely on behavioral responses and overlook physiological measures such as electroencephalogram (EEG). Moreover, the interaction between cognition and emotion during MOT tasks remains underexplored. This study addresses these gaps by examining cognitive load variations using the Theta/Alpha Ratio (TAR) in 31 ASD and 31 typically developing (TD) children, based on publicly available EEG data. Participants completed three tasks: neutral image viewing (IPAS), one-target 4-disc (MOT4), and one-target 8-disc (MOT8), representing low, intermediate, and high attentional loads, respectively, while listening to happiness and sadness prosodies. For each participant, TAR was calculated, and five EEG features were extracted: averaged TAR across all channels (allTAR) and TAR values from the frontal (fTAR), temporal (tTAR), parietal (pTAR), and central (cTAR) regions. A three-factor ANOVA (emotion types × attention levels × subject groups) was conducted, followed by post-hoc t-tests for multiple comparisons, and correlation analyses were performed between the five EEG features and clinical measures. Results revealed: (1) a significant interaction between attention level and emotional prosody for tTAR; (2) significant main effects of attention level in fTAR and cTAR, but no interaction with emotional prosody; (3) higher allTAR, fTAR, tTAR, cTAR, and pTAR in the ASD group compared to TD; and (4) stronger EEG clinical correlations in the ASD group during MOT-4. These findings confirm visual attention deficits and highlight the interplay between emotion and cognition in ASD, suggesting TAR as a potential biomarker for cognitive load and emotional modulation.

Objective biomarkers of cognitive performance in older adults with mild cognitive impairment: acoustic features of affective prosody.

The comprehension of emotions through speech, known as affective prosody comprehension, is an ability that decreases with healthy aging. Affective prosody comprehension is underpinned by three cognitive components (perceptual, lexical, and semantic). However, no data indicate which one(s) is/are impacted by aging. Affective prosody comprehension is based on the analysis of the emotional state of our interlocutor. However, it is still unknown if psycholinguistic variables permitting to access this emotional state such as emotion category, valence, or arousal impact affective prosody comprehension abilities differently according to age. This study aims to investigate the impacts of aging on affective prosody comprehension abilities, exploring the links with the underlying cognitive components and psycholinguistic variables. Sixty healthy adults were recruited: 30 younger (18-35 years old) and 30 older individuals (63+ years old). Participants completed a general task of affective prosody comprehension and three specific tasks each evaluating an underlying cognitive component (perceptual, lexical, semantic). Older adults showed a decreased performance in general affective prosody comprehension abilities and in lexical abilities specifically in comparison with younger adults. Also, psycholinguistic variables such as emotion category and arousal played a role in the decreased performance of older adults. These results constitute an additional advancement in understanding the normal functioning of affective prosody comprehension processes. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29330603.

Purpose: Affective prosody, which conveys emotions through variations in stress and pitch, is crucial for social interactions and emotional communication. This study investigates the acoustic correlates of expressive affective prosody in Kannada-speaking young female adults. Methods: The study involved 31 Kannada-speaking young female adults performing an expressive affective prosody task (reading sentences) for four emotions: happy, sad, anger, and fear. The data collected was acoustically analysed based on a few acoustic parameters such as fundamental frequency (F0) and its range and contour; intensity (I0) and its range; and rate of speech (ROS) across the four emotions. Results: Statistical analysis revealed significant differences across emotions for all parameters, with rate of speech and I0 range showing the most variance. The frequency measures showed significant differences among almost all the comparisons. For the F0 contour, happy and anger exhibited rising and falling patterns, while sad and fear showed falling and rising patterns. The mean rate of speech was highest for anger and lowest for happy. Intensity measures showed significant differences, particularly between happy vs. sad, and sad vs. anger. These observations are consistent with previous research but also had a few contradictory findings. Conclusion: The study highlights distinct acoustic profiles for different emotions in Kannada among young female adults, aiding in the understanding of normal affective expression. This normative data on prosodic features can serve as a benchmark for identifying deviations in individuals with neuro communication disorders affecting their emotional prosody. These acoustic parameters can be used for objective assessments in clinical settings to detect early changes in emotional expression. Future research should include diverse age groups, both genders and various dialects to enhance the generalizability of findings.

Emotional states can be characterised by specific acoustic parameters. Fundamental frequency (F0) reflects biomechanical characteristics of vocal folds and is sensitive to affective components. Vocally expressed negative emotions are accompanied by increased muscular activation, while positive and neutral emotions result in fewer physiological changes. The present study aimed to research (1) whether the length of linguistic unit impacts the change of F0; (2) whether F0 differs in words, phrases, and continuous speech produced in neutral, happy, and angry prosody. Methods: Ten professional actors (5 males, 5 females) recorded nine voice samples (4 words, 4 phrases, 1 paragraph) in neutral, happy, and angry intonations. Each linguistic unit was recorded three times, resulting in a data pool of 810 samples. Six experts assessed the affective component of each actor’s performance to obtain 270 highest-ranked samples. Selected recordings were analysed using the software PRAAT v. 6.1.31. and script Vocal fundamental frequency, v. 02.04 (Phonanium, 2019). Results: In females, there were no statistically significant differences in speaking F0 between different linguistic units within a single prosody type. In males, mean F0 significantly increased with the increasing complexity of the linguistic unit in neutral, but not affective conditions. Overall, the highest speaking F0 was observed in happy prosody for females and in angry prosody for males. Both genders showed significant differences in mean F0 between neutral and affective prosody in words and phrases. A statistically significant difference in F0 between angry and happy intonation was observed in phrases in males and in text in females. Conclusion: The results showed that affective prosody did not impact mean F0 between linguistic units of different complexity. However, emotional intonation increased speaking F0. The differences in F0 between neutral and affective prosody were observed in all components of linguistic hierarchy, from single words to continuous speech. Since voice is used in daily communication, recognizing the role of emotions in vocal output can improve understanding of functional voice disorders.

ABSTRACT Socio-affective functioning, or the way we interact and relate to others, is one of the four dynamic sexual recidivism risk domains. Accurately recognizing emotions enables the inference of mental and affective states supporting social adaptation. As little attention has been paid to affective prosody recognition in forensic inpatients who have committed sexual offenses (FICSOs), this study assessed the accuracy and sensitivity scores of 111 male participants assigned into three groups: FICSOs (n = 35), forensic inpatients who have committed non-sexual offenses (FICNSOs, n = 26) and community members (CoM, n = 50). Collected data also include response bias, emotion labeling reflection time, task easiness and task easiness reflection time. Using non-parametric group comparisons (Kruskal–Wallis H and Mann–Whitney U), results highlight, overall, a pervasive impairment of affective prosody recognition in FICSOs and FICNSOs compared to CoM. However, there was no difference in disgust sensitivity scores between FICSOs and CoM. FICSOs and FICNSOs took significantly longer than CoM to select an emotional label, especially for happiness. In addition, a metacognitive impairment was found in FICSOs and FICNSOs as they found the task significantly easier than CoM while being less sensitive.

Understanding how older adults perceive and interpret emotional cues in speech prosody contributes to our knowledge of cognitive aging. This study provides a systematic review with meta-analysis to investigate the extent of the decline in affective prosody recognition (APR) among older adults in terms of overall and emotion-specific performance and explore potential moderators that may cause between-studies heterogeneity. The literature search encompassed five electronic databases, with a specific emphasis on studies comparing the APR performance of older adults with that of younger adults. This comparison was focused on basic emotions. Meta-regression analyses were executed to pinpoint potential moderators related to demographic and methodological characteristics. A total of 19 studies were included in the meta-analysis, involving 560 older adults with a mean age of 69.15 years and 751 younger adults with a mean age of 23.02 years. The findings indicated a substantial negative effect size (g = -1.21). Furthermore, the magnitude of aggregated effect sizes showed a distinct valence-related recognition pattern with positive prosody exhibiting smaller effect sizes. Language background and years of education were found to moderate the overall and emotion-specific (i.e., disgust and surprise) performance effect estimate, and age and gender significantly influenced the effect estimate of happiness. The results confirmed a significant decline in APR ability among older adults compared to younger adults, but this decline was unbalanced across basic emotions. Language background and educational level emerged as significant factors influencing older adults' APR ability. Moreover, participants with a higher mean age exhibited notably poorer performance in recognizing happy prosody. These findings underscore the need to further investigate the neurobiological mechanisms for APR decline associated with aging. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26407888.

ABSTRACT Aging can impact emotional recognition, affecting older adults’ mental health and social function. This study examined how aging affects affective prosody comprehension (APC: understanding emotions through speech) across seven emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutrality) and its relationship with cognitive function (via the Montreal Cognitive Assessment) and social support (via the Social Support Rating Scale) in 199 cognitively normal older adults. We found that older adults had lower APC accuracy and more errors, often mistaking negative emotions for neutral or positive ones. APC accuracy was significantly associated with social support, and a partial least squares (PLS) cognitive component fully mediated the relationship between the APC component and social support utilization, explaining 61.7% of the total effect. These results suggest that declines in APC during aging are linked to social support utilization through cognitive function, offering insights for interventions to improve social and cognitive health in older adults.

목적 : 본 연구는 RHD 및 LHD 환자를 대상으로 하여 문장의미의 감정유형에 따른 정서적 운율 이해 능력을 조사하고, 문장의미의 감정유형과 정서 운율 일치 여부에 따라 집단 간 정서적 운율을 이해하는데 어떤 특성을 보이는지 파악하는 것이다.<br/>방법 : 대상자는 대구ㆍ경북에 거주 중인 만 55세 이상으로 좌·우반구 손상 환자는 각 12명씩 총 24명을 선정하였다. 과제는 감정이 내포된 문장과 감정 운율의 일치 여부에 따라 일치 조건과 불일치 조건으로 구분하였다. 대상자들에게 3가지 감정(기쁨, 슬픔, 화남)이 내포된 문장을 들려주며 기쁨, 슬픔, 화남 표정 중 하나를 선택하도록 그림을 제시하였다.<br/>결과 : 좌ㆍ우반구 손상 부위에 상관없이 세 가지 감정유형 중 슬픔 감정에서 그리고 문장의미-감정 일치 조건에서 운율 이해능력(정반응점수, 반응시간)이 높게 나타났다.<br/>결론 : 언어적 의미처리가 반영된 정서적 운율 과제에서 좌ㆍ우반구의 상대적 우세성 유무가 존재하는지 확인한 결과, 정서적 운율 특징인 음도, 억양, 속도 등 다양한 요소들과 관련된 정보들이 단순히 한쪽 반구에만 의존하지 않음을 알 수 있었다. 뇌졸중 환자는 메시지 의도와 감정이 일치할 때 정서적 운율을 더 쉽게 이해하고 빠르게 반응할 수 있었는데 이는 정서적 운율과 불일치하는 문장의미의 감정 유형에서 차별적으로 주의를 산만하게 만든다는 것을 의미하고 발화의 의미 해석으로 주의가 흩어짐으로써 운율 이해에 더욱 어려움을 겪을 수 있다는 것을 확인할 수 있었다.

Human emotions are intricately expressed through vocal sounds, encompassing affective prosody in speech and non-verbal cues such as screams and laughter. Recent evidence indicates that vocalizations take neurophysiological precedence over speech-embedded emotions and are generally easier to identify. However, Cochlear implant (CI) users still face challenges deciphering the subtle nuances in these primal signals. The implant's limited fidelity in transmitting acoustic information results in highly variable levels of emotion perception abilities among its users. Identifying the factors explaining this significant variability in abilities among CI users remains of great interest. Our recent investigations into CI users' abilities to perceive emotions and speaker sincerity have often incorporated diverse aspects of auditory proficiency, including pitch discrimination, music processing, and speech intelligibility. The combination of results from these different projects can help shed light on the intricate interplay between speech processing and emotional recognition in CI users. Surprisingly, even when presented with emotional musical stimuli, CI users' proficiency often leaned toward processes related to speech intelligibility, proposing common mechanisms underlying linguistic and affective processes in CI users that do not readily relate to musical skills or pitch sensitivity. Hence, maintaining a clinical focus on speech processing remains crucial, even when exploring affective skills in CI users.

Deficits in facial emotion recognition have frequently been established in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). However, static, rather than dynamic emotion recognition paradigms have been applied. Affective prosody has been insufficiently studied in TLE, and there is a lack of studies investigating associations between auditory and visual emotion recognition. We wished to investigate potential deficits in a dynamic morph task of facial emotion recognition and in an affective prosody recognition task, as well as associations between both tasks. 25 patients with TLE and 24 healthy controls (CG) performed a morph task with faces continuously changing in their emotional intensity. They had to press a button, as soon as they were able to recognize the emotion expressed, and label it accordingly. In the auditory task, subjects listened to neutral sentences spoken in varying emotional tones, and labeled the emotions. Correlation analyses were conducted across both tasks. TLE patients showed significantly reduced prosody recognition compared to CG, and in the morph task, there was a statistical trend towards significantly reduced performance for TLE. Recognition rates in both tasks were significantly associated. TLE patients show deficits in affective prosody recognition, and they may also be impaired in a morph task with dynamically changing facial expressions. Impairments in basic social-cognitive tasks in TLE seem to be modality-independent.

Affective prosody would refer to the perception of the emotional state of a speaker based on the prosodic aspects of one’s speech. The affective prosody is often studied in individuals with right hemisphere damage or non-native speakers solely because the perception of affective prosody is localized to the right hemisphere and the non-native speakers are reliant on affective prosody as they are deprived of linguistic prosody. The current study was carried out with the aim of investigating if the affective prosody varies as a function of age. The study was carried out on two groups of non-native speakers of Malayalam of 8-12 years and 18-25 years respectively. Different sentence types were presented to these participants in auditory modality and the results showed that the performance of participants in the age range of 18-25 years performed better compared to individuals of the age-range 8-12 years showing that the development of affective prosody would show a developmental trend.

Abstract Background: Speech emotion recognition can be experimentally tested in native and nonnative languages, as the mechanisms involved would differ across these languages. The recognition of speech in the native language is mediated through the language, and in nonnative languages, speech emotion recognition is facilitated through affective prosody. Linguistic prosody is anchored by the left hemisphere, whereas the right hemisphere coordinates the right hemisphere. The current study was carried out with the aim of testing speech emotion recognition in native and nonnative speakers with the motive of assessing the basic role of language in mediating prosody. Methods: The study was carried out on native and nonnative speakers of Malayalam, Assamese, and Bengali. Fifteen sentences (5 declarative, 5 interrogative, and 5 exclamatory) were recorded from native speakers of the aforementioned languages; these sentences were played to native speakers and nonnative speakers of a given language. For instance, the sentences in Malayalam were played to native speakers of Malayalam and nonnative speakers (speakers of Assamese and Bengali). The response sheet had three smileys, and the participants were asked to mark the appropriate smiley after listening to the sentences. Each correct response was given a score of 1, whereas an incorrect response was given a score of 0. Results: The native speakers of Malayalam, Assamese, and Bengali secured scores of 13.14 and 15 in their native languages, respectively. In the nonnative language, the participants secured scores in the range of 2–5. The Kruskal–Wallis test showed a significant difference between the native and nonnative languages. The results depicted that the native speakers of a language were able to identify the speech emotions easily, whereas they had difficulty identifying the sentences in the other two languages. The same trend was observed for speakers of Malayalam, Assamese, and Bengali. This showed that speech emotion recognition was linguistically driven. Conclusions: The results highlight that the prosody is more linguistically driven as the performance in the native language was better than in nonnative languages.

Based on the seminal publications of Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke who established that aphasic syndromes (disorders of the verbal-linguistic aspects of communication) were predominantly the result of focal left-hemisphere lesions, "language" is traditionally viewed as a lateralized function of the left hemisphere. This, in turn, has diminished and delayed the acceptance that the right hemisphere also has a vital role in language, specifically in modulating affective prosody, which is essential for communication competency and psychosocial well-being. Focal lesions of the right hemisphere may result in disorders of affective prosody (aprosodic syndromes) that are functionally and anatomically analogous to the aphasic syndromes that occur following focal left-hemisphere lesions. This paper will review the deductive research published over the last four decades that has elucidated the neurology of affective prosody which, in turn, has led to a more complete and nuanced understanding of the neurology of language, depression, emotions and memory. In addition, the paper will also present the serendipitous clinical observations (inductive research) and fortuitous inter-disciplinary collaborations that were crucial in guiding and developing the deductive research processes that culminated in the concept that primary emotions and related display behaviors are a lateralized function of the right hemisphere and social emotions, and related display behaviors are a lateralized function of the left hemisphere.