Prosody Processing Research Articles

Emotional prosody processing in autism spectrum disorder.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are characterized by severe deficits in social communication, whereby the nature of their impairments in emotional prosody processing have yet to be specified. Here, we investigated emotional prosody processing in individuals with ASD and controls with novel, lifelike behavioral and neuroimaging paradigms. Compared to controls, individuals with ASD showed reduced emotional prosody recognition accuracy on a behavioral task. On the neural level, individuals with ASD displayed reduced activity of the STS, insula and amygdala for complex vs basic emotions compared to controls. Moreover, the coupling between the STS and amygdala for complex vs basic emotions was reduced in the ASD group. Finally, groups differed with respect to the relationship between brain activity and behavioral performance. Brain activity during emotional prosody processing was more strongly related to prosody recognition accuracy in ASD participants. In contrast, the coupling between STS and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity predicted behavioral task performance more strongly in the control group. These results provide evidence for aberrant emotional prosody processing of individuals with ASD. They suggest that the differences in the relationship between the neural and behavioral level of individuals with ASD may account for their observed deficits in social communication.

Impaired neural discrimination of emotional speech prosody in children with autism spectrum disorder and language impairment

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by deficient social and communication skills, including difficulties in perceiving speech prosody. The present study addressed processing of emotional prosodic changes (sad, scornful and commanding) in natural word stimuli in typically developed school-aged children and in children with ASD and language impairment. We found that the responses to a repetitive word were diminished in amplitude in the children with ASD, reflecting impaired speech encoding. Furthermore, the amplitude of the MMN/LDN component, reflecting cortical discrimination of sound changes, was diminished in the children with ASD for the scornful deviant. In addition, the amplitude of the P3a, reflecting involuntary orienting to attention-catching changes, was diminished in the children with ASD for the scornful deviant and tended to be smaller for the sad deviant. These results suggest that prosody processing in ASD is impaired at various levels of neural processing, including deficient pre-attentive discrimination and involuntary orientation to speech prosody.

Recognition of emotional prosody in anorexia nervosa

Deficits in emotional processes are often observed by clinicians in anorexia nervosa and may have an impact on social functioning. Recognition of emotion was mostly investigated using visual stimuli as faces of emotional scenes. Only one study (Kucharska-Pietura et al., 2004) demonstrated impairments in emotional prosody using positive and negative valenced stimuli. However, this study did not provide a highlight for the identification of emotional bias (for example, to recognize an intense fear in a friendly voice). The aim of this study is to better understand the recognition of emotional prosody in anorexia nervosa using a wide range of positive, negative and neutral stimuli (Belin et al., 2008).In order to test emotion recognition biases in emotional prosody, we exposed 15 patients with anorexia nervosa and 15 healthy controls (HCs) to emotional vocal tasks asking them to rate emotional intensity on visual analog scales. In addition, we assessed clinical symptomatology and cognitive functioning for all participants.We showed that patients with anorexia nervosa provided higher intensity ratings on the non-target scales (e.g., surprise scale for fear stimuli) than HCs for sadness, fear and neutral voices. Furthermore, with the exception of neutral vocal stimuli, they provided the same intensity ratings on the target scales as the HCs.These findings suggested a bias in the processing of emotional prosody and may impact the social functioning of patients with anorexia nervosa. The bias may result from a sensorial deficit or a high-order cognitive dysfunction and have to be investigated in future studies.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Neural basis of processing threatening voices in a crowded auditory world.

In real world situations, we typically listen to voice prosody against a background crowded with auditory stimuli. Voices and background can both contain behaviorally relevant features and both can be selectively in the focus of attention. Adequate responses to threat-related voices under such conditions require that the brain unmixes reciprocally masked features depending on variable cognitive resources. It is unknown which brain systems instantiate the extraction of behaviorally relevant prosodic features under varying combinations of prosody valence, auditory background complexity and attentional focus. Here, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the effects of high background sound complexity and attentional focus on brain activation to angry and neutral prosody in humans. Results show that prosody effects in mid superior temporal cortex were gated by background complexity but not attention, while prosody effects in the amygdala and anterior superior temporal cortex were gated by attention but not background complexity, suggesting distinct emotional prosody processing limitations in different regions. Crucially, if attention was focused on the highly complex background, the differential processing of emotional prosody was prevented in all brain regions, suggesting that in a distracting, complex auditory world even threatening voices may go unnoticed.

How children use emotional prosody: Crossmodal emotional integration?

A crossmodal effect has been observed in the processing of facial and vocal emotion in adults and infants. For the first time, we assessed whether this effect is present in childhood by administering a crossmodal task similar to those used in seminal studies featuring emotional faces (i.e., a continuum of emotional expressions running from happiness to sadness: 90% happy, 60% happy, 30% happy, neutral, 30% sad, 60% sad, 90% sad) and emotional prosody (i.e., sad vs. happy). Participants were 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children and a control group of adult students. The children had a different pattern of results from the adults, with only the 9-year-olds exhibiting the crossmodal effect whatever the emotional condition. These results advance our understanding of emotional prosody processing and the efficiency of crossmodal integration in children and are discussed in terms of a developmental trajectory and factors that may modulate the efficiency of this effect in children. (PsycINFO Database Record

Advanced Parkinson disease patients have impairment in prosody processing

ABSTRACTBackground: The ability to recognize and interpret emotions in others is a crucial prerequisite of adequate social behavior. Impairments in emotion processing have been reported from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease (PD). This study aims to characterize emotion recognition in advanced Parkinson’s disease (APD) candidates for deep-brain stimulation and to compare emotion recognition abilities in visual and auditory domains. Method: APD patients, defined as those with levodopa-induced motor complications (N = 42), and healthy controls (N = 43) matched by gender, age, and educational level, undertook the Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS), a battery that evaluates recognition of seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and neutral) on facial expressions and four emotions on prosody (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear). APD patients were assessed during the “ON” state. Group performance was compared with independent-samples t tests. Results: Compared to controls, APD had significantly lower scores on the discrimination and naming of emotions in prosody, and visual discrimination of neutral faces, but no significant differences in visual emotional tasks. Conclusion: The contrasting performance in emotional processing between visual and auditory stimuli suggests that APD candidates for surgery have either a selective difficulty in recognizing emotions in prosody or a general defect in prosody processing. Studies investigating early-stage PD, and the effect of subcortical lesions in prosody processing, favor the latter interpretation. Further research is needed to understand these deficits in emotional prosody recognition and their possible contribution to later behavioral or neuropsychiatric manifestations of PD.

You may now kiss the bride: Interpretation of social situations by individuals with right or left hemisphere injury

While left hemisphere damage (LHD) has been clearly shown to cause a range of language impairments, patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) also exhibit communication deficits, such as difficulties processing prosody, discourse, and social contexts. In the current study, individuals with RHD and LHD were directly compared on their ability to interpret what a character in a cartoon might be saying or thinking, in order to better understand the relative role of the right and left hemisphere in social communication. The cartoon stimuli were manipulated so as to elicit more or less formulaic responses (e.g., a scene of a couple being married by a priest vs. a scene of two people talking, respectively). Participants' responses were scored by blind raters on how appropriately they captured the gist of the social situation, as well as how formulaic and typical their responses were. Results showed that RHD individuals' responses were rated as significantly less appropriate than controls and were also significantly less typical than controls and individuals with LHD. Individuals with RHD produced a numerically lower proportion of formulaic expressions than controls, but this difference was only a trend. Counter to prediction, the pattern of performance across participant groups was not affected by how constrained/formulaic the social situation was. The current findings expand our understanding of the roles that the right and left hemispheres play in social processing and communication and have implications for the potential treatment of social communication deficits in individuals with RHD.

Recognition of emotional prosody in anorexia nervosa

Deficits in emotional processes are often observed by clinicians in anorexia nervosa and may have an impact on social functioning. Recognition of emotion was mostly investigated using visual stimuli as faces of emotional scenes. Only one study (Kucharska-Pietura et al., 2004) demonstrated impairments in emotional prosody using positive and negative valenced stimuli. However, this study did not provide a highlight for the identification of emotional bias (for example, to recognize an intense fear in a friendly voice). The aim of this study is to better understand the recognition of emotional prosody in anorexia nervosa using a wide range of positive, negative and neutral stimuli (Belin et al., 2008). In order to test emotion recognition biases in emotional prosody, we exposed 15 patients with anorexia nervosa and 15 healthy controls (HCs) to emotional vocal tasks asking them to rate emotional intensity on visual analog scales. In addition, we assessed clinical symptomatology and cognitive functioning for all participants. We showed that patients with anorexia nervosa provided higher intensity ratings on the non-target scales (e.g., surprise scale for fear stimuli) than HCs for sadness, fear and neutral voices. Furthermore, with the exception of neutral vocal stimuli, they provided the same intensity ratings on the target scales as the HCs. These findings suggested a bias in the processing of emotional prosody and may impact the social functioning of patients with anorexia nervosa. The bias may result from a sensorial deficit or a high-order cognitive dysfunction and have to be investigated in future studies.

Reappraising the voices of wrath.

Cognitive reappraisal recruits prefrontal and parietal cortical areas. Because of the near exclusive usage in past research of visual stimuli to elicit emotions, it is unknown whether the same neural substrates underlie the reappraisal of emotions induced through other sensory modalities. Here, participants reappraised their emotions in order to increase or decrease their emotional response to angry prosody, or maintained their attention to it in a control condition. Neural activity was monitored with fMRI, and connectivity was investigated by using psychophysiological interaction analyses. A right-sided network encompassing the superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus and the inferior frontal gyrus was found to underlie the processing of angry prosody. During reappraisal to increase emotional response, the left superior frontal gyrus showed increased activity and became functionally coupled to right auditory cortices. During reappraisal to decrease emotional response, a network that included the medial frontal gyrus and posterior parietal areas showed increased activation and greater functional connectivity with bilateral auditory regions. Activations pertaining to this network were more extended on the right side of the brain. Although directionality cannot be inferred from PPI analyses, the findings suggest a similar frontoparietal network for the reappraisal of visually and auditorily induced negative emotions.

Intonation processing deficits of emotional words among Mandarin Chinese speakers with congenital amusia: an ERP study.

Background: Congenital amusia is a disorder that is known to affect the processing of musical pitch. Although individuals with amusia rarely show language deficits in daily life, a number of findings point to possible impairments in speech prosody that amusic individuals may compensate for by drawing on linguistic information. Using EEG, we investigated (1) whether the processing of speech prosody is impaired in amusia and (2) whether emotional linguistic information can compensate for this impairment.Method: Twenty Chinese amusics and 22 matched controls were presented pairs of emotional words spoken with either statement or question intonation while their EEG was recorded. Their task was to judge whether the intonations were the same.Results: Amusics exhibited impaired performance on the intonation-matching task for emotional linguistic information, as their performance was significantly worse than that of controls. EEG results showed a reduced N2 response to incongruent intonation pairs in amusics compared with controls, which likely reflects impaired conflict processing in amusia. However, our EEG results also indicated that amusics were intact in early sensory auditory processing, as revealed by a comparable N1 modulation in both groups.Conclusion: We propose that the impairment in discriminating speech intonation observed among amusic individuals may arise from an inability to access information extracted at early processing stages. This, in turn, could reflect a disconnection between low-level and high-level processing.

Processing of affective prosody in boys suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: A near-infrared spectroscopy study

Neurobiological studies on facial affect recognition have demonstrated reduced response amplitudes to anger cues in patients suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is still unclear whether a similar deficit exists in the auditory domain. Therefore, this near-infrared spectroscopy study focused on neuronal correlates of affective prosody processing. Fourteen boys suffering from ADHD and fourteen healthy boys were exposed to emotionally intoned, standardized sentences of the categories anger, sadness, happiness, and to affectively neutral sentences. Relative to controls, the patients displayed a diminished activation of the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) when processing anger prosody, which was correlated with aggressive behavior. There were no group differences for the other emotions. Additionally, the ADHD group showed increased supramarginal gyrus (SMG) activation in the anger condition. This might mirror compensatory attention allocation. In summary, we identified a selectively lowered STG activation to auditory anger cues in ADHD patients. Consequently, STG recruitment during anger exposure might be used for evaluation of psychotherapy effects.

Sadness is unique: neural processing of emotions in speech prosody in musicians and non-musicians.

Musical training has been shown to have positive effects on several aspects of speech processing, however, the effects of musical training on the neural processing of speech prosody conveying distinct emotions are yet to be better understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether the neural responses to speech prosody conveying happiness, sadness, and fear differ between musicians and non-musicians. Differences in processing of emotional speech prosody between the two groups were only observed when sadness was expressed. Musicians showed increased activation in the middle frontal gyrus, the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex and the retrosplenial cortex. Our results suggest an increased sensitivity of emotional processing in musicians with respect to sadness expressed in speech, possibly reflecting empathic processes.

Bilateral dorsal and ventral fiber pathways for the processing of affective prosody identified by probabilistic fiber tracking

Dorsal and ventral pathways for syntacto-semantic speech processing in the left hemisphere are represented in the dual-stream model of auditory processing. Here we report new findings for the right dorsal and ventral temporo-frontal pathway during processing of affectively intonated speech (i.e. affective prosody) in humans, together with several left hemispheric structural connections, partly resembling those for syntacto-semantic speech processing. We investigated white matter fiber connectivity between regions responding to affective prosody in several subregions of the bilateral superior temporal cortex (secondary and higher-level auditory cortex) and of the inferior frontal cortex (anterior and posterior inferior frontal gyrus). The fiber connectivity was investigated by using probabilistic diffusion tensor based tractography. The results underscore several so far underestimated auditory pathway connections, especially for the processing of affective prosody, such as a right ventral auditory pathway. The results also suggest the existence of a dual-stream processing in the right hemisphere, and a general predominance of the dorsal pathways in both hemispheres underlying the neural processing of affective prosody in an extended temporo-frontal network.

Neural Processing of Emotional Prosody across the Adult Lifespan.

Emotion recognition deficits emerge with the increasing age, in particular, a decline in the identification of sadness. However, little is known about the age-related changes of emotion processing in sensory, affective, and executive brain areas. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated neural correlates of auditory processing of prosody across adult lifespan. Unattended detection of emotional prosody changes was assessed in 21 young (age range: 18–35 years), 19 middle-aged (age range: 36–55 years), and 15 older (age range: 56–75 years) adults. Pseudowords uttered with neutral prosody were standards in an oddball paradigm with angry, sad, happy, and gender deviants (total 20% deviants). Changes in emotional prosody and voice gender elicited bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG) responses reflecting automatic encoding of prosody. At the right STG, responses to sad deviants decreased linearly with age, whereas happy events exhibited a nonlinear relationship. In contrast to behavioral data, no age by sex interaction emerged on the neural networks. The aging decline of emotion processing of prosodic cues emerges already at an early automatic stage of information processing at the level of the auditory cortex. However, top-down modulation may lead to an additional perceptional bias, for example, towards positive stimuli, and may depend on context factors such as the listener's sex.

Individual differences in the perception of melodic contours and pitch-accent timing in speech: Support for domain-generality of pitch processing.

Do the same mechanisms underlie processing of music and language? Recent investigations of this question have yielded inconsistent results. Likely factors contributing to discrepant findings are use of small samples and failure to control for individual differences in cognitive ability. We investigated the relationship between music and speech prosody processing, while controlling for cognitive ability. Participants (n = 179) completed a battery of cognitive ability tests, the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) to assess music perception, and a prosody test of pitch peak timing discrimination (early, as in insight vs. late, incite). Structural equation modeling revealed that only music perception was a significant predictor of prosody test performance. Music perception accounted for 34.5% of variance on prosody test performance; cognitive abilities and music training added only about 8%. These results indicate musical pitch and temporal processing are highly predictive of pitch discrimination in speech processing, even after controlling for other possible predictors of this aspect of language processing.

The music of language: An ERP investigation of the effects of musical training on emotional prosody processing

Recent studies have demonstrated the positive effects of musical training on the perception of vocally expressed emotion. This study investigated the effects of musical training on event-related potential (ERP) correlates of emotional prosody processing.Fourteen musicians and fourteen control subjects listened to 228 sentences with neutral semantic content, differing in prosody (one third with neutral, one third with happy and one third with angry intonation), with intelligible semantic content (semantic content condition – SCC) and unintelligible semantic content (pure prosody condition – PPC).Reduced P50 amplitude was found in musicians. A difference between SCC and PPC conditions was found in P50 and N100 amplitude in non-musicians only, and in P200 amplitude in musicians only. Furthermore, musicians were more accurate in recognizing angry prosody in PPC sentences.These findings suggest that auditory expertise characterizing extensive musical training may impact different stages of vocal emotional processing.

Impaired emotional prosody processing in severe traumatic brain injury

Impaired emotional prosody processing in severe traumatic brain injury

Prosodic awareness is related to reading ability in children with autism spectrum disorders

Prosodic awareness has been linked with reading accuracy in typically developing children. Although children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have difficulty processing prosody and often have trouble learning to read, no previous study has looked at the link between explicit prosodic awareness and reading in ASD. In the current study, 29 early readers with ASD (5–11 years) completed word and nonword reading accuracy tasks and two measures of prosodic awareness. Tasks relating to phonological awareness, oral language, vocabulary, letter knowledge and nonverbal intelligence were also administered. A key finding was that there was a relationship between prosodic awareness and both word and nonword reading accuracy.

Social cognition in schizophrenic patients: the effect of semantic content and emotional prosody in the comprehension of emotional discourse.

Background: The recognition of the emotion expressed during conversation relies on the integration of both semantic processing and decoding of emotional prosody. The integration of both types of elements is necessary for social interaction. No study has investigated how these processes are impaired in patients with schizophrenia during the comprehension of an emotional speech. Since patients with schizophrenia have difficulty in daily interactions, it would be of great interest to investigate how these processes are impaired. We tested the hypothesis that patients present lesser performances regarding both semantic and emotional prosodic processes during emotional speech comprehension compared with healthy participants.Methods: The paradigm is based on sentences built with emotional (anger, happiness, or sadness) semantic content uttered with or without congruent emotional prosody. The study participants had to decide with which of the emotional categories each sentence corresponded.Results: Patients performed significantly worse than their matched controls, even in the presence of emotional prosody, showing that their ability to understand emotional semantic content was impaired. Although prosody improved performances in both groups, it benefited the patients more than the controls.Conclusion: Patients exhibited both impaired semantic and emotional prosodic comprehensions. However, they took greater advantage of emotional prosody adjunction than healthy participants. Consequently, focusing on emotional prosody during carrying may improve social communication.

Cerebral processing of prosodic emotional signals: evaluation of a network model using rTMS.

A great number of functional imaging studies contributed to developing a cerebral network model illustrating the processing of prosody in the brain. According to this model, the processing of prosodic emotional signals is divided into three main steps, each related to different brain areas. The present study sought to evaluate parts of the aforementioned model by using low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over two important brain regions identified by the model: the superior temporal cortex (Experiment 1) and the inferior frontal cortex (Experiment 2). The aim of both experiments was to reduce cortical activity in the respective brain areas and evaluate whether these reductions lead to measurable behavioral effects during prosody processing. However, results obtained in this study revealed no rTMS effects on the acquired behavioral data. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed in the paper.