Perception Of Prosody Research Articles

More Than Words: the Relative Roles of Prosody and Semantics in the Perception of Emotions in Spoken Language by Postlingual Cochlear Implant Users.

The processing of emotional speech calls for the perception and integration of semantic and prosodic cues. Although cochlear implants allow for significant auditory improvements, they are limited in the transmission of spectro-temporal fine-structure information that may not support the processing of voice pitch cues. The goal of the current study is to compare the performance of postlingual cochlear implant (CI) users and a matched control group on perception, selective attention, and integration of emotional semantics and prosody. Fifteen CI users and 15 normal hearing (NH) peers (age range, 18-65 years) 1istened to spoken sentences composed of different combinations of four discrete emotions (anger, happiness, sadness, and neutrality) presented in prosodic and semantic channels-T-RES: Test for Rating Emotions in Speech. In three separate tasks, listeners were asked to attend to the sentence as a whole, thus integrating both speech channels (integration), or to focus on one channel only (rating of target emotion) and ignore the other (selective attention). Their task was to rate how much they agreed that the sentence conveyed each of the predefined emotions. In addition, all participants performed standard tests of speech perception. When asked to focus on one channel, semantics or prosody, both groups rated emotions similarly with comparable levels of selective attention. When the task was called for channel integration, group differences were found. CI users appeared to use semantic emotional information more than did their NH peers. CI users assigned higher ratings than did their NH peers to sentences that did not present the target emotion, indicating some degree of confusion. In addition, for CI users, individual differences in speech comprehension over the phone and identification of intonation were significantly related to emotional semantic and prosodic ratings, respectively. CI users and NH controls did not differ in perception of prosodic and semantic emotions and in auditory selective attention. However, when the task called for integration of prosody and semantics, CI users overused the semantic information (as compared with NH). We suggest that as CI users adopt diverse cue weighting strategies with device experience, their weighting of prosody and semantics differs from those used by NH. Finally, CI users may benefit from rehabilitation strategies that strengthen perception of prosodic information to better understand emotional speech.

Perception of Music and Speech Prosody After Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

The present study aimed to examine the perception of music and prosody in patients who had undergone a severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Our second objective was to describe the association between music and prosody impairments in clinical individual presentations. Thirty-six patients who were out of the acute phase underwent a set of music and prosody tests: two subtests of the Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Amusia evaluating respectively melody (scale) and rhythm perception, two subtests of the Montreal Evaluation of Communication on prosody understanding in sentences, and two other tests evaluating prosody understanding in vowels. Forty-two percent of the patients were impaired in the melodic test, 51% were impaired in the rhythmic test, and 71% were impaired in at least one of the four prosody tests. The amusic patients performed significantly worse than non-amusics on the four prosody tests. This descriptive study shows for the first time the high prevalence of music deficits after severe TBI. It also suggests associations between prosody and music impairments, as well as between linguistic and emotional prosody impairments. Causes of these impairments remain to be explored.

Right ventral stream damage underlies both poststroke aprosodia and amusia.

This study was undertaken to determine and compare lesion patterns and structural dysconnectivity underlying poststroke aprosodia and amusia, using a data-driven multimodal neuroimaging approach. Thirty-nine patients with right or left hemisphere stroke were enrolled in a cohort study and tested for linguistic and affective prosody perception and musical pitch and rhythm perception at subacute and 3-month poststroke stages. Participants listened to words spoken with different prosodic stress that changed their meaning, and to words spoken with six different emotions, and chose which meaning or emotion was expressed. In the music tasks, participants judged pairs of short melodies as the same or different in terms of pitch or rhythm. Structural magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired at both stages, and machine learning-based lesion-symptom mapping and deterministic tractography were used to identify lesion patterns and damaged white matter pathways giving rise to aprosodia and amusia. Both aprosodia and amusia were behaviorally strongly correlated and associated with similar lesion patterns in right frontoinsular and striatal areas. In multiple regression models, reduced fractional anisotropy and lower tract volume of the right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus were the strongest predictors for both disorders, over time. These results highlight a common origin of aprosodia and amusia, both arising from damage and disconnection of the right ventral auditory stream integrating rhythmic-melodic acoustic information in prosody and music. Comorbidity of these disabilities may worsen the prognosis and affect rehabilitation success.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP).

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings. These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

Age and sex effects in emotional prosody processing revealed in infants' mismatch responses but not in preferential looking time

Emotional prosody is crucial in early communication, but the developmental trend and the emergence of sex differences in infants’ emotional processing remain unclear. This report compared 46 infants’ behavioral and neurophysiological responses to four vocal emotions (happy, angry, sad, and neutral). We used a central fixation paradigm to measure infants’ listening times to different emotions and a multi-feature oddball paradigm with electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to measure infants’ mismatch responses (MMRs) to vocal emotional changes. We modified both paradigms by including non-repeating words within each emotion, enforcing infant listeners to respond to the overarching emotional prosodic category. We only observed age and sex effects in infants’ MMRs. Older infants showed more negative MMRs to happy and sad voices than younger infants, but more positive MMRs to angry voices. Female infants showed more positive MMRs at a later time window than male infants across all emotional changes, indicating an emotion-general sex effect. The behavioral study showed longer listening times for happy and sad prosodies across age and sex. The findings indicate that neurophysiological measurement may be more sensitive in capturing age and sex effects in early emotional prosody perception when complex speech materials are used.

Visual prosody supports reading aloud expressively for deaf readers

Type is a wonderful tool to represent speech visually. Therefore, it can provide deaf individuals the information that they miss auditorily. Still, type does not represent all the information available in speech: it misses an exact indication of prosody. Prosody is the motor of expressive speech through speech variations in loudness, duration, and pitch. The speech of deaf readersis often less expressive because deafness impedes the perception and production of prosody. Support can be provided by visual cues that provide information about prosody—visual prosody—supporting both the training of speech variations and expressive reading.
 We will describe the influence of visual prosody on the reading expressiveness of deaf readers between age 7 and 18 (in this study, ‘deaf readers’ means persons with any kind of hearing loss, with or without hearing devices, who still developed legible speech). A total of seven cues visualize speech variations: a thicker/thinner font corresponds with a louder/quieter voice; a wider/narrower font relates to a lower/faster speed; a font raised above/lowered below the baseline suggests a higher/lower pitch; wider spaces between words suggest longer pauses.
 We evaluated the seven cues with questionnaires and a reading aloud test. Deaf readers relate most cues to the intendedspeech variation and read most of them aloud correctly. Only the raised cue is di#cult to connect to the intended speech variation at first, and a faster speed and lower pitch prove challenging to vocalize. Despite those two difficulties, this approach to visual prosody is elective in supporting speech prosody. The applied materials can form an example for typographers, type designers, graphic designers, teachers, speech therapists, and researchers developing expressive reading materials.

Recognizing emotions in speech makes you more credulous

ABSTRACT The individual differences determining the ability to detect lies are poorly understood. This study investigated the predictive power of self-monitoring, lexical access, lexico-semantic processes, emotional prosody perception, discourse comprehension, mental imagery and attention on the ability to discriminate lies from truth and on response tendencies in a lie detection task. One hundred and four participants (50% female) were asked to listen to audio-recordings of people describing a relative (50% deceptive) and to judge whether each of them was lying or telling the truth. Participants were also asked to perform several auditory tasks assessing above-mentioned processes and also completed the Self-Monitoring Scale. Multiple regression analyses showed that emotional prosody perception predicted truth bias and that performance in the mental imagery task tended to predict the ability to distinguish truth from lies. These results suggest that competence in emotion recognition leads to label statements as being truthful.

Age-Related Changes in Voice Emotion Recognition by Postlingually Deafened Listeners With Cochlear Implants.

Identification of emotional prosody in speech declines with age in normally hearing (NH) adults. Cochlear implant (CI) users have deficits in the perception of prosody, but the effects of age on vocal emotion recognition by adult postlingually deaf CI users are not known. The objective of the present study was to examine age-related changes in CI users' and NH listeners' emotion recognition. Participants included 18 CI users (29.6 to 74.5 years) and 43 NH adults (25.8 to 74.8 years). Participants listened to emotion-neutral sentences spoken by a male and female talker in five emotions (happy, sad, scared, angry, neutral). NH adults heard them in four conditions: unprocessed (full spectrum) speech, 16-channel, 8-channel, and 4-channel noise-band vocoded speech. The adult CI users only listened to unprocessed (full spectrum) speech. Sensitivity (d') to emotions and Reaction Times were obtained using a single-interval, five-alternative, forced-choice paradigm. For NH participants, results indicated age-related declines in Accuracy and d', and age-related increases in Reaction Time in all conditions. Results indicated an overall deficit, as well as age-related declines in overall d' for CI users, but Reaction Times were elevated compared with NH listeners and did not show age-related changes. Analysis of Accuracy scores (hit rates) were generally consistent with d' data. Both CI users and NH listeners showed age-related deficits in emotion identification. The CI users' overall deficit in emotion perception, and their slower response times, suggest impaired social communication which may in turn impact overall well-being, particularly so for older CI users, as lower vocal emotion recognition scores have been associated with poorer subjective quality of life in CI patients.

Perception of prosody in children with auditory processing disorders

ABSTRACT The objective of this study was to investigate perception of affective prosody in a group of children diagnosed as having auditory processing disorders (APDs) and compare their performance with those of typically developing children. Auditory Linguistic Integration test in Marathi, which assesses affective prosody, was administered on 159 children in the age range of 5–7 years. Among them, 53 children had APD, and 106 children did not have APD. The results of the study revealed that the perception of affective prosody was significantly poor in children with APD when compared to typically developing children. The results of the study suggested that a subset of children with APD may show difficulty in the perception of affective prosody. Further studies need to be carried out to explore the factors that can affect the perception of affective prosody in children with APD.

Auditory Processing Disorders in Elderly Persons vs. Linguistic and Emotional Prosody.

Background: Language communication, which is one of the basic forms of building and maintaining interpersonal relationships, deteriorates in elder age. One of the probable causes is a decline in auditory functioning, including auditory central processing. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the profile of central auditory processing disorders in the elderly as well as the relationship between these disorders and the perception of emotional and linguistic prosody. Methods: The Right Hemisphere Language Battery (RHLB-PL), and the Brain-Boy Universal Professional (BUP) were used. Results: There are statistically significant relationships between emotional prosody and: spatial hearing (r(18) = 0.46, p = 0.04); the time of the reaction (r(18) = 0.49, p = 0.03); recognizing the frequency pattern (r(18) = 0.49, p = 0.03 (4); and recognizing the duration pattern (r(18) = 0.45, p = 0.05. There are statistically significant correlations between linguistic prosody and: pitch discrimination (r(18) = 0.5, p = 0.02); recognition of the frequency pattern (r(18) = 0.55, p = 0.01); recognition of the temporal pattern; and emotional prosody (r(18) = 0.58, p = 0.01). Conclusions: The analysis of the disturbed components of auditory central processing among the tested samples showed a reduction in the functions related to frequency differentiation, the recognition of the temporal pattern, the process of discriminating between important sounds, and the speed of reaction. De-automation of the basic functions of auditory central processing, which we observe in older age, lowers the perception of both emotional and linguistic prosody, thus reducing the quality of communication in older people.

The specificity of cerebral lateralization in perception of emotional intonation of speech among children with special abilities

Much attention has been recently given to examination of developmental peculiarities of cognitive processes of children and adolescents with special abilities. The goal lies in comparative study of the ontogenetic peculiarities of cerebral mechanisms underlying the processing of emotional information in children who are engaged in extracurricular musical and mathematical activities. The sampling included the children engaged in additional activities and the control group, and consisted of the three age groups: 7-10 year, 10-13 years, and 14-17 years. In the conducted experimental studies, the respondents had to identify the emotional intonation of speech in the given phrase. The study revealed the significant ontogenetic differences in perception of emotional prosody of speech between the control group and the children engaged in additional activities. In the group of children of 7-13 years, who are engaged in additional classes, the predominant activity of left hemisphere testifies to the specificity of inter-hemispheric connections in the perception of emotional information. The dependence of the effects of cerebral lateralization on age was analogous in the groups of children engaged in mathematical and musical activities; and differed from the results of the control group, which allows claiming that the interinfluence of mathematical and musical skills is to a certain extent explained by the peculiarities of developmental age of cerebral lateralization in childhood and adolescence.

Theory of Mind and Executive Functions in Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Specific Learning Disorder.

Background:Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and specific learning disorder (SLD) generally have difficulties in social cognition and display impairments involving emotion and face and prosody perception and reduced empathy, indicating theory of mind (ToM) impairment. The objective of this work was to assess and compare the executive functions and ToM in children with ADHD and SLD.Methods:Twenty children diagnosed with ADHD, 20 children diagnosed with SLD, and 20 normal healthy children in the age group of 7 to 15 years, IQ between 90 and 110 (average intelligence) of any gender, were recruited. All participants were assessed using neuropsychological tests of executive functions and ToM.Results:Significant differences were found on early ToM, basic ToM, advanced ToM, and mean scores on ToM inventory between ADHD and control groups (P ≤ 0.001). Similarly, significant differences were found between ADHD and SLD groups on early, basic, advanced, and mean ToM inventory scores (P < 0.001). No significant differences were found between the control and SLD groups on ToM measures. Further, in the ToM task battery, on task D and task G, significant differences were found between the SLD and control groups at P = 0.04 and P = 0.03 respectively. Differences between ADHD and control groups were also statistically significant on task D and task G at P < 0.001 and P = 0.033. Executive functions in the form of set-shifting and response inhibition were significantly poor in the ADHD group and SLD group at P < 0.001 and P < 0.05 levels, respectively, when compared to the control group.Conclusion:Children with ADHD displayed more deficits in the ToM inventory and tasks than children having SLD and healthy children of their similar age and educational background. Executive functions (set-shifting and response inhibition) were poorer in children with ADHD and children with SLD when compared to healthy children of their similar age and educational background.

Crucial Music Components Needed for Speech Perception Enhancement of Pediatric Cochlear Implant Users: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Although many clinicians have attempted music training for the hearing-impaired children, no specific effects have yet been reported for individual music components. This paper seeks to discover specific music components that help in improving speech perception of children with cochlear implants (CI) and to identify the effective training periods and methods needed for each component. Method: While assessing 5 electronic databases, that is, ScienceDirect, Scopus, PubMed, CINAHL, and Web of Science, 1,638 articles were found initially. After the screening and eligibility assessment stage based on the Participants, Intervention, Comparisons, Outcome, and Study Design (PICOS) inclusion criteria, 18 of 1,449 articles were chosen. Results: A total of 18 studies and 14 studies (209 participants) were analyzed using a systematic review and meta-analysis, respectively. No publication bias was detected based on an Egger’s regression result even though the funnel plot was asymmetrical. The results of the meta-analysis revealed that the largest improvement was seen for rhythm perception, followed by the perception of pitch and harmony and smallest for timbre perception after the music training. The duration of training affected the rhythm, pitch, and harmony perception but not the timbre. Interestingly, musical activities, such as singing, produced the biggest effect size, implying that children with CI obtained the greatest benefits of music training by singing, followed by playing an instrument and achieved the smallest effect by only listening to musical stimuli. Significant improvement in pitch perception helped with the enhancement of prosody perception. Conclusion: Music training can improve the music perception of children with CI and enhance their speech prosody. Long training duration was shown to provide the largest training effect of the children’s perception improvement. The children with CI learned rhythm and pitch better than they did with harmony and timbre. These results support the finding of past studies that with music training, both rhythm and pitch perception can be improved, and it also helps in the development of prosody perception.

Восприятие просодии безличных фраз со значением отказа носителями русского языка: лингвистический и паралингвистический аспекты

Восприятие просодии безличных фраз со значением отказа носителями русского языка: лингвистический и паралингвистический аспекты

Perception and Production of Prosody in People with Hearing Loss

Perception and Production of Prosody in People with Hearing Loss

The combined Perception of Socio-affective Prosody: Cultural Differences in Pattern Matching

The combined Perception of Socio-affective Prosody: Cultural Differences in Pattern Matching

Left hemispheric deficit in the sustained neuromagnetic response to periodic click trains in children with ASD

BackgroundDeficits in perception and production of vocal pitch are often observed in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the neural basis of these deficits is unknown. In magnetoencephalogram (MEG), spectrally complex periodic sounds trigger two continuous neural responses—the auditory steady state response (ASSR) and the sustained field (SF). It has been shown that the SF in neurotypical individuals is associated with low-level analysis of pitch in the ‘pitch processing center’ of the Heschl’s gyrus. Therefore, alternations in this auditory response may reflect atypical processing of vocal pitch. The SF, however, has never been studied in people with ASD.MethodsWe used MEG and individual brain models to investigate the ASSR and SF evoked by monaural 40 Hz click trains in boys with ASD (N = 35) and neurotypical (NT) boys (N = 35) aged 7–12-years.ResultsIn agreement with the previous research in adults, the cortical sources of the SF in children were located in the left and right Heschl’s gyri, anterolateral to those of the ASSR. In both groups, the SF and ASSR dominated in the right hemisphere and were higher in the hemisphere contralateral to the stimulated ear. The ASSR increased with age in both NT and ASD children and did not differ between the groups. The SF amplitude did not significantly change between the ages of 7 and 12 years. It was moderately attenuated in both hemispheres and was markedly delayed and displaced in the left hemisphere in boys with ASD. The SF delay in participants with ASD was present irrespective of their intelligence level and severity of autism symptoms.LimitationsWe did not test the language abilities of our participants. Therefore, the link between SF and processing of vocal pitch in children with ASD remains speculative.ConclusionChildren with ASD demonstrate atypical processing of spectrally complex periodic sound at the level of the core auditory cortex of the left-hemisphere. The observed neural deficit may contribute to speech perception difficulties experienced by children with ASD, including their poor perception and production of linguistic prosody.

Perception of speech stress in children with hearing impairment

PurposeThe study aimed to test effect of training on the perception of speech stress in children with severe to profound hearing impairment. The first objective was to compare the speech stress perception scores of children with hearing impairment and language age-matched children with normal hearing sensitivity after short term prosody training and the second objective was to correlate between the speech stress perception scores and the language age of the children with hearing impairment. MethodThirty children with normal hearing (CWNH) in the age range of 3–7 years and thirty children with hearing impairment (CWHI) who had a language age of 3–7 years participated in the study. The authors formulated 24 concrete Malayalam sentences and their picture cognate pairs (stressed and unstressed) for each sentence. The stressed and unstressed version for each sentence was audio recorded separately.The study was carried out in two phases; phase 1 included the training on acoustic cues of speech stress followed by testing in phase 2. Both the phases were attended by all the participants. ResultsThere was a significant difference between the CWNH and CWHI wherein, children with hearing impairment had lower speech stress perception scores. However, improvements in speech stress perception were observed in children with hearing impairment after the training phase. Also, a positive correlation between the language age and the perception of speech stress scores in CWHI was found indicating that as the language age increased there was an increase in the speech stress perception scores. ConclusionThe pre and post training speech stress perception scores were significantly different, with higher scores on the post-training test, indicating that the short term speech stress training for the children with hearing impairment was beneficial. The positive strong correlation between stress perception scores and language age shows that, prosody perception and language learning facilitate each other. Thereby, the conventional speech-language and auditory training should expand and include prosody training from an early age for children with hearing impairment.

Emotional prosody perception in presbycusis patients after auditory rehabilitation

ObjectivePerception of emotion plays a major role in social interaction. Studies have shown that hearing loss and aging degrade emotional recognition. The main aim of the present study was to evaluate the benefit of first-time hearing aids (HA) for emotional prosody perception in presbycusis patients. Secondary objectives comprised comparison with normal-hearing subjects, and assessment of the impact of demographic and audiologic factors. MethodsTo assess HA impact, 29 subjects with presbycusis were included. They were tested without HA and 1 month after starting to use HA. A test with emotional hearing stimuli (Montreal Affective Voice test: MAV) was performed at various intensities (50, 65 and 80dB SPL). Patients’ experience was evaluated on the Profile of Emotional Competence questionnaire, before and after HA fitting. Results were compared with those of 29 normal-hearing subjects. ResultsAuditory rehabilitation did not significantly improve MAV results (P>0.005), or subjective questionnaire results (P>0.005). Scores remained lower than those of normal-hearing subjects (P<0.001). MAV results, before and after HA, showed significant correlation with pure-tone average (r=−0.88, P<0.001) and age (r=0.44, P=0.018). The older the presbycusis patient and the more severe the hearing loss, the greater the difficulty in recognising emotional prosody. ConclusionDespite hearing rehabilitation, presbycusis patients’ results remained poorer than in normal-hearing subjects.

Emotional speech prosody perception in the first year of life

Prosodic aspects of speech are considered more salient than linguistic features in prenatal listening environment. The literature on early prosodic speech perception has been largely focused on the role of infant-directed speech in language development. While emotional prosody is also ubiquitous and contains diverse social cues, its perceptual development trajectory remains unclear. The current study adopted the central fixation paradigm to investigate 3- to 12-month-old infants' preferential listening attention to English monosyllabic words spoken in neutral, happy, angry, and sad tones. Forty-six infants completed the experiment and were assigned to younger and older groups with the median cut-off age of 8 months. Linear mixed-effect model results revealed a prevailing trend of shorter listening time for the sad tone. Furthermore, this reduced level of attention was only statistically significant in the younger infants but not the older group, suggesting that the lower-pitched and longer sad prosody was least attractive to the younger infants. With more exposure to emotional speech and the ongoing neural commitment towards language-specific speech perception in the older infants, the early differential interests in voice emotions showed signs of mitigation in the context of spoken words, leading to a relative increase in their listening time to the sad tone.