Emotional Prosody Production Research Articles

Emotional prosody perception and production are linked in prelingually deaf children with cochlear implantsa).

Links between perception and production of emotional prosody by children with cochlear implants (CIs) have not been extensively explored. In this study, production and perception of emotional prosody were measured in 20 prelingually deaf school-age children with CIs. All were implanted by the age of 3, and most by 18 months. Emotion identification was well-predicted by prosody productions in terms of voice pitch modulation and duration. This finding supports the idea that in prelingually deaf children with CIs, production of emotional prosody is associated with access to auditory cues that support the perception of emotional prosody.

Sex related differences in the perception and production of emotional prosody in adults.

This study aimed to investigate the features of sex-related emotional prosody production patterns and perception abilities in adult speakers. The study involved 42 native Turkish speakers (27 females and 15 males). Sex-related perception and production of the emotions "anger," "joy," "sadness," and "neutral" were examined. Participants were first asked to indicate the actor's emotional state by selecting one of the given emotion alternatives provided. They were then instructed to produce the same stimuli with varying emotions. We analyzed the change in voice characteristics employed in different emotions in terms of F0 (Hz), speaking rate (seconds), and intensity (dB) using pairwise emotion comparison. The findings showed no sex differences in emotional prosody perceptions (p = 0.725). However, differences in the production of emotional prosody between sex have been documented in pitch variation of speech. Within-group analyses revealed that women tended to use a higher pitch when expressing joy versus sadness and a neutral state of feeling. Both men and women exhibited varying loudness levels for different emotional states in the speech loudness analysis. When expressing sadness, both men and women speak slower than when expressing as contrasted to anger, joy, or neutral states of feeling. Although Turkish speakers' ability to perceive emotional prosody is similar to that of other languages, they favor speech loudness fluctuation in the production of emotional prosody.

Emotional Prosody Processing in Schizophrenic Patients: A Selective Review and Meta-Analysis.

Emotional prosody (EP) has been increasingly recognized as an important area of schizophrenic patients’ dysfunctions in their language use and social communication. The present review aims to provide an updated synopsis on emotional prosody processing (EPP) in schizophrenic disorders, with a specific focus on performance characteristics, the influential factors and underlying neural mechanisms. A literature search up to 2018 was conducted with online databases, and final selections were limited to empirical studies which investigated the prosodic processing of at least one of the six basic emotions in patients with a clear diagnosis of schizophrenia without co-morbid diseases. A narrative synthesis was performed, covering the range of research topics, task paradigms, stimulus presentation, study populations and statistical power with a quantitative meta-analytic approach in Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Version 2.0. Study outcomes indicated that schizophrenic patients’ EPP deficits were consistently observed across studies (d = −0.92, 95% CI = −1.06 < δ < −0.78), with identification tasks (d = −0.95, 95% CI = −1.11 < δ < −0.80) being more difficult to process than discrimination tasks (d = −0.74, 95% CI = −1.03 < δ < −0.44) and emotional stimuli being more difficult than neutral stimuli. Patients’ performance was influenced by both participant- and experiment-related factors. Their social cognitive deficits in EP could be further explained by right-lateralized impairments and abnormalities in primary auditory cortex, medial prefrontal cortex and auditory-insula connectivity. The data pointed to impaired pre-attentive and attentive processes, both of which played important roles in the abnormal EPP in the schizophrenic population. The current selective review and meta-analysis support the clinical advocacy of including EP in early diagnosis and rehabilitation in the general framework of social cognition and neurocognition deficits in schizophrenic disorders. Future cross-sectional and longitudinal studies are further suggested to investigate schizophrenic patients’ perception and production of EP in different languages and cultures, modality forms and neuro-cognitive domains.

Emotional Communication in Long-Term Abstained Alcoholics.

Alcoholism is associated with difficulties in perceiving emotions through nonverbal channels including prosody. The question whether these difficulties persist to long-term abstinence has, however, received little attention. In a 2-part investigation, emotional prosody production was investigated in long-term abstained alcoholics and age- and education-matched healthy controls. First, participants were asked to produce semantically neutral sentences in different emotional tones of voice. Samples were then acoustically analyzed. Next, naïve listeners were asked to recognize the emotional intention of speakers from a randomly collected subset. Voice quality indicators were also assessed by the listeners. Findings revealed emotional prosody production differences between the 2 groups. Differences were particularly apparent when looking at pitch use. Alcoholics' mean and variability of pitch differed significantly from controls' use. The use of loudness was affected to a lesser extent. Crucially, naïve raters confirmed that the intended emotion was more difficult to recognize from exemplars produced by alcoholics. Differences between the 2 groups were also found with regard to voice quality. These results suggest that emotional communication difficulties can persist long after alcoholics have quit drinking.

Prosody production networks are modulated by sensory cues and social context.

The neurobiology of emotional prosody production is not well investigated. In particular, the effects of cues and social context are not known. The present study sought to differentiate cued from free emotion generation and the effect of social feedback from a human listener. Online speech filtering enabled functional magnetic resonance imaging during prosodic communication in 30 participants. Emotional vocalizations were (i) free, (ii) auditorily cued, (iii) visually cued or (iv) with interactive feedback. In addition to distributed language networks, cued emotions increased activity in auditory and—in case of visual stimuli—visual cortex. Responses were larger in posterior superior temporal gyrus at the right hemisphere and the ventral striatum when participants were listened to and received feedback from the experimenter. Sensory, language and reward networks contributed to prosody production and were modulated by cues and social context. The right posterior superior temporal gyrus is a central hub for communication in social interactions—in particular for interpersonal evaluation of vocal emotions.

A Neurolinguistic Investigation of Emotional Prosody and Verbal Components of Speech

Emotional prosody has a key role implication of timbre component, mood sense, and prosodic content. For this reason, it serves a highly important function for sense, the meaning to be reflected, and ability to provide effective communication. Due to its crucial role in verbal communication, it has a critical relationship within many disciplines such as linguistics, computer sciences, medicine, etc. Consequently, the knowledge of how the 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. From this point of view, the current study takes an interdisciplinary perspective to address the investigation of brain localization of emotional prosody and verbal components of speech. In accordance with this purpose, the fNIRS technique was used. fNIRS has recently become popular as an emerging optical brain imaging technique for studying human brain. However, it is still not widespread compared to other neuroimaging techniques. This study was conducted on both 20 healthy native speakers of Turkish and English. Participants were recorded by using fNIRS while performing emotional prosody production and auditory stimulus tasks to measure the brain activation. Our results showed superior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, which includes primary and secondary auditory cortex, and superior temporal cortex, which comprises of temporal sulcus, were strongly activated by prosodies irrespective of emotional valence. Our findings also demonstrated left inferior frontal gyrus which comprises of pars triangularis; (Broadmann Area 45) and the frontal eye field (Broadmann Area 8) were significantly activated for happy, angry, and fearful prosodies.

Altered identification with relative preservation of emotional prosody production in patients with Alzheimer's disease

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show cognitive and behavioral disorders, which they and their caregivers have difficulties to cope with in daily life. Psychological symptoms seem to be increased by impaired emotion processing in patients, this ability being linked to social cognition and thus essential to maintain good interpersonal relationships. Non-verbal emotion processing is a genuine way to communicate, especially so for patients whose language may be rapidly impaired. Many studies focus on emotion identification in AD patients, mostly by means of facial expressions rather than emotional prosody; even fewer consider emotional prosody production, despite its playing a key role in interpersonal exchanges. The literature on this subject is scarce with contradictory results. The present study compares the performances of 14 AD patients (88.4±4.9 yrs; MMSE: 19.9±2.7) to those of 14 control subjects (87.5±5.1 yrs; MMSE: 28.1±1.4) in tasks of emotion identification through faces and voices (non linguistic vocal emotion or emotional prosody) and in a task of emotional prosody production (12 sentences were to be pronounced in a neutral, positive, or negative tone, after a context was read). The Alzheimer's disease patients showed weaker performances than control subjects in all emotional recognition tasks and particularly when identifying emotional prosody. A negative relation between the identification scores and the NPI (professional caregivers) scores was found which underlines their link to psychological and behavioral disorders. The production of emotional prosody seems relatively preserved in a mild to moderate stage of the disease: we found subtle differences regarding acoustic parameters but in a qualitative way judges established that the patients' productions were as good as those of control subjects. These results suggest interesting new directions for improving patients' care.

Prosodic Impairment in Alzheimer's Disease: Assessment and Clinical Relevance

Prosodic Impairment in Alzheimer's Disease: Assessment and Clinical Relevance

Changes of emotional prosody in Parkinson's disease

Even though the mesocortical dopamine system is known to play an important role in affect control and reward related behaviour, only little is known about the impact of Parkinson's disease on emotional communication. The ability to perceive and express emotions via speech plays an essential role in every day social life. Here, studies investigating perception and production of emotional prosody in Parkinson's disease will be reviewed and own results will be presented. Evidence will be provided that patients with Parkinson's disease do have changes of emotional prosody processing and that they also show alterations of emotional speech production. Together, these studies highlight the importance of the basal ganglia and their connections for emotional communication.

Deviant prosody in patients with cortical damage

The clinical impression is that deviant linguistic prosody, deviant tone, intonation, stress and duration, is primarily found in patients with left hemisphere damage. The paper discusses to what extent acoustic investigations of the speech of patients with cortical damage, and studies of the ability to perceive prosodic distinctions in the same patient groups, support the clinical impression of a left hemisphere superiority in prosodic processing. The paper also addresses the question of hemispheric specialization of emotional prosody, the assumption that emotional prosody is primarily a property of the right hemisphere. Recent studies have found disturbed comprehension and production of emotional prosody as a result of damage to either hemisphere.

Expression and recognition of speech emotional prosody: aspect of speakers-listeners individual features

Event Abstract Back to Event Expression and recognition of speech emotional prosody: aspect of speakers-listeners individual features Elena Dmitrieva1*, Victor Gelman2, Kira Zaitseva1 and Alexandr Orlov1 1 Russian Academy of Science, Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, Russia 2 St-Petersburg Medical Academy of Postgraduate Studies, Russia Decoding nonverbal emotional expressions is an important part of speech communication and human behavior. Emotional intonation of a message may override its linguistic content. Although person-distinctive features of speech emotional perception have got some consideration few studies have aimed to specify how emotional prosody perception based on different speaker voices. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between speaker-distinctive features of emotional prosody production and listener-distinctive features of speech emotional valence recognition. The corpus of semantically neutral speech utterances of different emotional intonations (neutral, happy, angry) was created by method of emotions¢ simulating; spectral analysis was carried out. 12 speakers of 20-70 years old were both professional actors and non-actors. The sample of listeners consisted of 42 persons of the same age-range. The task was to recognize the emotional tone valence. The ANOVA of the data obtained on accuracy of recognition (AR) as dependent variable, and age and sex of subjects, set of acoustic and experimental parameters as independent ones revealed “type of emotion”, “sex of listeners” factors and “sex of listeners” * “age of listeners” interaction to be highly significant (p<0.01). The acoustic parameters’ values of each emotional intonation were compared to the corresponding values of neutral emotional intonation and differences were calculated. The direction of these deviations has been shown not to depend on linguistic content of speech utterance and its duration, on speaker´s age, gender and being actor or non-actor, though the personal features of the speakers have influenced the absolute values. The similar result was obtained for the AR: the personal features of the speakers have influenced the absolute values of recognition, but the directions of deviation from the AR of neutral intonation were the same for different speakers. Support by the RFH grant 07-06-00821a. Conference: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting, Rhodes Island, Greece, 13 Sep - 18 Sep, 2009. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster presentations Citation: Dmitrieva E, Gelman V, Zaitseva K and Orlov A (2009). Expression and recognition of speech emotional prosody: aspect of speakers-listeners individual features. Conference Abstract: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.08.2009.09.135 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 09 Jun 2009; Published Online: 09 Jun 2009. * Correspondence: Elena Dmitrieva, Russian Academy of Science, Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry, St. Petersburg, Russia, dmit49@mail.ru Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Elena Dmitrieva Victor Gelman Kira Zaitseva Alexandr Orlov Google Elena Dmitrieva Victor Gelman Kira Zaitseva Alexandr Orlov Google Scholar Elena Dmitrieva Victor Gelman Kira Zaitseva Alexandr Orlov PubMed Elena Dmitrieva Victor Gelman Kira Zaitseva Alexandr Orlov Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

An acoustic investigation of Parkinsonian speech in linguistic and emotional contexts

The speech prosody of a group of patients in the early stages of Parkinson's disease (PD) was compared to that of a group of healthy age- and education-matched controls to quantify possible acoustic changes in speech production secondary to PD. Both groups produced standardized speech samples across a number of prosody conditions: phonemic stress, contrastive stress, and emotional prosody. The amplitude, fundamental frequency, and duration of all tokens were measured. PD speakers produced speech that was of lower amplitude than the tokens of healthy speakers in many conditions across all production tasks. Fundamental frequency distinguished the two speaker groups for contrastive stress and emotional prosody production, and duration differentiated the groups for phonemic stress production. It was concluded that motor impairments in PD lead to adverse and varied acoustic changes which affect a number of prosodic contrasts in speech and that these alterations appear to occur in earlier stages of disease progression than is often presumed by many investigators.

Affective facial and lexical expression in aprosodic versus aphasic stroke patients

Past research has shown that lesions in the left cerebral hemisphere often result in aphasia, while lesions in the right hemisphere frequently impair the production of emotional prosody and facial expression. At least 3 processing deficits might account for these affective symptoms: (1) failure to understand the conditions that evoke emotional response; (2) inability to experience emotions; (3) disruption in the capacity to encode non-verbal signals. To better understand these disorders and their underlying mechanisms, we investigated spontaneous affective communication in right hemisphere damaged (RHD) stroke patients with aprosody and left hemisphere damaged (LHD) stroke patients with aphasia. Nine aprosodic RHD patients and 14 aphasic LHD patients participated in a videotaped interview within a larger treatment protocol. Two naïve raters viewed segments of videotape and rated facial expressivity. Verbal affect production was tabulated using specialized software. Results indicated that RHD patients smiled and laughed significantly less than LHD patients. In contrast, RHD patients produced a greater percentage of emotion words relative to total words than did LHD patients. These findings suggest that impairments in emotional prosodic production and facial expressivity associated with RHD are not induced by affective-conceptual deficits or an inability to experience emotions. Rather, they likely represent channel-specific nonverbal encoding abnormalities.

A Study of Emotional Processing in Parkinson's Disease

This study investigated three aspects of processing materials with emotional content in patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD): the ability to produce affective prosody, to discriminate affectively loaded speech, and to detect the surprise element in humorous sketches. Study aims were the characterization of an emotional processing deficit, and to test whether impaired emotional processing is mental state dependent. Forty-eight nondemented PD patients were divided according to neuropsychological criteria into a sample with intact mental functions and a sample with mild to moderate cognitive deterioration, particularly memory impairment. PD patients with intact cognitive functions were solely impaired at producing affectively loaded sentences, but otherwise displayed normal emotional processing abilities as compared to a clinical control group. PD patients with mental impairment were significantly disabled on all three tasks. The observed emo- tional processing deficit was not related to variables like age, disease duration, de- gree of functional impairment, motor disability or depression. Active and receptive emotional prosody were significantly correlated. Further strong positive correlations were found between the ability to disclose pictorial humour and tasks of visuo-conceptual knowledge, as well as between the ability to produce affectively loaded speech and years of schooling. These results were interpreted as indicating that not only the production of emotional prosody, but also its recognition and the discovery of pictorial humour are reduced in a subgroup of PD patients with mental impairment. Impaired emotional processing skills are mental state dependent findings in PD which seem to be independent from demographic or disease variables and may indicate beginning dementia.