Prosodic Focus Research Articles

The left inferior frontal gyrus under focus: an fMRI study of the production of deixis via syntactic extraction and prosodic focus

The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG, BA 44, 45, 47) has been associated with linguistic processing (from sentence- to syllable-parsing) as well as action analysis. We hypothesize that the function of the LIFG may be the monitoring of action, a function well adapted to agent deixis (verbal pointing at the agent of an action). The aim of this fMRI study was therefore to test the hypothesis that the LIFG is involved during the production of agent deixis. We performed an experiment, whereby three kinds of deictic sentences were pronounced, involving prosodic focus, syntactic extraction and prosodic focus with syntactic extraction. A common pattern of activation was found for the three deixis conditions in the LIFG (BA 45 and/or 47), the left insula and the bilateral premotor (BA 6) cortex. Prosodic deixis additionally activated the left anterior cingulate gyrus (BA 24, 32), the left supramarginal gyrus (LSMG, BA 40) and Wernicke's area (BA 22). Our results suggest that the LIFG is involved during agent deixis, through either prosody or syntax, and that the LSMG and Wernicke's area are additionally required in prosody-driven deixis. Once grammaticalized, deixis would be handled solely by the LIFG, without the LSMG and Wernicke's area.

Implicit processing of prosodic information in patients with left and right hemisphere stroke

Background : Investigations of prosodic processing in brain-damaged patients have primarily focused on hemispheric specialisations in the processing of prosodic structures. Most studies of receptive prosodic abilities in brain-damaged people share a common methodological approach, i.e., they are based on explicit tasks. No attention has been paid so far to the impact of explicit or implicit experimental methodologies. Aims : The aim of this study was to compare implicit and explicit experimental paradigms of receptive prosodic processing in patients with focal left and right hemisphere lesions. Methods & Procedures : Two implicit processing paradigms were used to investigate the comprehension of turn-related prosody (turn-detection task) and of prosodic focus (phoneme-detection task) in patients with focal cerebro-vascular lesions to the left or right cerebral hemisphere. The results were compared with explicit processing data of two matched patient groups selected from a larger sample of an earlier study. Outcomes & Results : (a) In the turn-detection experiment normal subjects and left hemisphere damaged patients relied on prosodic information to detect conversational turns, whereas right hemisphere damaged patients were unable to benefit from the prosodic structure of utterances. A comparison of these results with the performance of two matched patient groups on an explicit "non-linguistic prosodic" paradigm (rating of emotional prosody) revealed the same pattern. b) In the phoneme-detection experiment prosodic focus information influenced detection latencies in both patient groups, i.e., RHD and LHD patients were able to process prosodic focus in an implicit manner. In the explicit processing of prosodic focus (identification task), RHD patients were moderately disturbed, while LHD patients showed more severe impairments. Conclusions : The finding that RHD patients showed impaired performance in three out of four tasks confirmed a substantial deficit in the processing of prosodic information. Their preserved performance in the implicit processing of prosodic focus can be explained by the presence of local cues. On the contrary, the results of the LHD subjects indicate that earlier findings of an impaired prosodic focus processing in these patients might be attributable to the explicit nature of the tasks used in most studies rather than to a primary deficit in the processing of prosodic structures.

Stress group patterns, focus signalling and sentence intonation in two regional Danish standard languages: Aalborg and Næstved

This paper investigates stress group patterns, prosodic focus signalling and sentence intonation contours in Standard Danish as spoken on a substratum of Northern Jutland (Aalborg) and South Zealand (Næstved) dialect. The major difference between these two regions (and the difference to Standard Copenhagen Danish) is to be found in the way segments and Fo patterns are aligned in the prosodic stress group. Both regions share with Copenhagen the global signalling of sentence intonation contours, as well as a pronounced reluctance to indicate, with prosodic means, in this style of delivery, the pragmatic, contextually invited focus of the utterance.