Types Of Prosody Research Articles

Hearing fearful prosody impairs visual working memory maintenance

Interference by distractors has been associated multiple times with diminished visual and auditory working memory (WM) performance. Negative emotional distractors in particular lead to detrimental effects on WM. However, these associations have only been seen when distractors and items to maintain in WM are from the same sensory modality. In this study, we investigate cross-modal interference on WM. We invited 20 participants to complete a visual change-detection task, assessing visual WM (VWM), while hearing emotional (fearful) and neutral auditory distractors. Electrophysiological activity was recorded to measure contralateral delay activity (CDA) and auditory P2 event-related potentials (ERP), indexing WM maintenance and distractor salience respectively. At the behavioral level, fearful prosody didn't decrease significantly working memory accuracy, compared to neutral prosody. Regarding ERPs, fearful distractors evoked a greater P2 amplitude than neutral distractors. Correlations between the two ERP potentials indicated that P2 amplitude difference between the two types of prosody was associated with the difference in CDA amplitude for fearful and neutral trials. This association suggests that cognitive resources required to process fearful prosody detrimentally impact VWM maintenance. That result provides a piece of additional evidence that negative emotional stimuli produce greater interference than neutral stimuli and that the cognitive resources used to process stimuli from different modalities come from a common pool.

The Change and Difference of the Prosody

Prosody in Tamil has changed and developed from time to time. Prosody itself helps in the creation of traditional poems. Apart from creating traditional poems, prosody is also a tool for knowing the structure and meaning of songs composed on the basis of a tradition dating back to ancient times. It is prosody that lays down the rules for the style of the verse, which treats the subject matter of the book with sound and appearance. If the ideas expressed are in the style of a poem, then the prose has no use for the reciter. That is why, compared to prose, the style of the poem becomes superior. Since all our ancient texts are composed in the style of poetry, the practice of prosody is essential for our fullest experience of them. Tolkappiya poetry is an uncommon component of understanding the structure of ancient Tamil poetry. The former praised the prosodic features and developed them from time to time. The Tholkappiyar was also well-versed in the prosodic system that existed before him. He praises the creators of prosody that existed before him as 'Yaappari Pulavar (Poets who know Prosody)'. Tolkappiyam is the first book we have today to expound the Prosody. After Tholkappiyam, books such as Kakkaipaadiniyam, Avinayam, Yaapparungalam, Yaapparungalakaarikai, Veerachozhiyam, Muthuveeriyam, Palkaayam, etc., have appeared to describe prosody. It is natural that from time to time the emergence of new types of prosody and changes in old prosodic types occur. Therefore, the prosody explained by other poets’ texts differs in some respects from the grammatical trend of Tholkappiyar. This article is based on how Tolkappiyar's opinion about prosodic parts in the grammar of prosody has been changed or different in the prosodic texts that appeared after him.

Emotional prosody of Parkinsonians following subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation

Abstract Objectives Investigation of potential differences in both perception and expression of emotional prosody between the stimulation and non-stimulation state of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients treated with subthalamic nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation (STN-DBS). Materials and methods A group of 16 PD patients were studied for two distinct research tasks. In the first one (estimation of prosody perception), a battery of words/sentences recorded by a professional announcer was administered to them in STN-DBS-on state and they were asked to select the correct prosody each time. The procedure was repeated in the STN-DBS-off state. In the second task (estimation of prosody expression), the patients were given a second battery of recordings using the same words and sentences but in different prosody and were asked to reproduce the prosody they heard, again in STN-DBS-on/off states. Their recorded voice was later given to 50 healthy control listeners, aware of the target prosody, who evaluated the patients' ability to correctly reproduce the prosody using a 6-point scale. Results The overall performance of the PD participants in the perception of prosody task was 45.3% and 49.8% for the DBS- on and DBS- off state respectively (p = 0.173). The specific percentages of correct perception of different types of prosody ranged from 31.3% to 62.5% and did not differ significantly between the DBS states. The rates of misclassifications were not consistently in favor of DBS -on or DBS -off state. Prosody expression in DBS- off state was rated by normal listeners as better compared to the DBS- οn state. Conclusions Regarding prosody perception, no significant differences were found either in the overall performance of PD patients or in the prosody-specific correct classification rates. However, particular stimulation states favor different misclassification directions. DBS -on state negatively influences the expression of emotional prosody in the speech of patients with Parkinson's disease.

It's special the way you say it: An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of two types of prosody

Sentence prosody is long known to serve both linguistic functions (e.g. to differentiate between questions and statements) and emotional functions (e.g. to detect the emotional state of a speaker). These different functions of prosodic information need to be encoded rapidly during sentence comprehension to ensure successful speech communication. However, systematic investigations of the comparative nature of these two functions, i.e. are the two functions of prosody independent or interdependent, are sparse. The question at hand is whether the two prosodic functions engage a similar neural network and run a similar time-course or not. To this aim we investigated whether emotional and linguistic prosody are processed independently or dependently in an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment. We merged a prosodically neutral head of a sentence to a second half of a sentence that differed in emotional and/or linguistic prosody. In a within-subjects design, two tasks were administered: in the “emotion task”, participants judged whether the sentence that they had just heard was spoken in a neutral tone of voice or not (emotional task); in the “linguistic task”, participants decided whether the sentence was a declarative sentence or not. As predicted, the previously reported prosodic expectancy positivity (PEP) was elicited by linguistic and emotional prosodic expectancy violations. However, the latency and distribution of the ERP component differed: whilst responses to emotional prosodic expectancy violations were elicited shortly after an expectancy violation (∼470ms post splicing-point) and most prominently at posterior electrode-sites, the positivity in response to linguistic prosody had a later onset (∼620ms post splicing-point) with a more frontal distribution. Interestingly, responses to combined (linguistic and emotional) expectancy violations resulted in a broadly distributed positivity with an onset of ∼170ms post expectancy violation. These effects were found irrespective of the task setting. Given the differences in latency and distribution, we conclude that the processing of emotional and linguistic prosody relies at least partly on differing neural mechanisms and that emotional prosodic aspects of language are processed in a prioritized processing stream.

Aprosodia Secondary to Right Hemisphere Damage

AbstractPurpose: This article introduces two types of prosody in human communication; describes right hemisphere contributions to prosody; describes prosodic deficits associated with right hemisphere damage; and discusses prevalence, quality of life, spontaneous recovery, and treatment of aprosodia.Method: Definitions of affective and linguistic prosody and aprosodia are provided. Results of lesion studies and neuroimaging studies are reviewed to inform the reader of the importance of the right hemisphere in prosody expression and comprehension, as well as to describe patterns of prosodic deficits in individuals with right hemisphere damage.Results and Conclusions: There is a large body of evidence supporting the role of the right hemisphere in affective prosody comprehension and production. Specifically, frontal brain regions and the basal ganglia are associated with aprosodia, suggesting there may be an underlying motor impairment. Because aprosodia is enduring and can impact quality of life, it is important to gain a better understanding of this disorder so that clinicians can accurately diagnose prosodic deficits and provide informed treatment.

Receptive prosody in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

People with Williams syndrome (WS) are known to use prosodic devices extensively in conversation and narratives, but their ability to interpret prosody to comprehend speakers' communicative intentions and emotional states has not been investigated systematically. We present findings from three experiments probing sensitivity to lexical stress and to affective prosodic cues considered at several processing levels. Adolescents and adults with WS were compared with age, IQ and receptive vocabulary-matched participants with learning or intellectual disabilities (LID), and with age-matched normal controls (NC). The WS group performed significantly better than the LID group only in recognising emotional tone of voice in filtered speech. Results reflect a relative sensitivity in the WS group to affective prosody, while the ability to use linguistic prosodic cues for semantic interpretation remains constrained by perceptual and cognitive limitations, suggesting a possible dissociation in sensitivity to different types of prosody in this population.

Prosody and lexical accuracy in flat affect schizophrenia

To test the hypothesis that flat affect in schizophrenia involves a motor-expressive deficiency, but not an emotional deficiency, we compared the acoustic properties of speech that are used to express emotion with the emotional content of the words. DSM-III-R schizophrenic patients were divided into flat ( N=20) and non-flat affect ( N=26) groups on the basis of rating-scale scores. Twenty normal subjects also were included. Subjects were recorded on audio tape as they described a happy and a sad experience for about 10 min. The recordings were analyzed acoustically for fluency and for two types of prosody: inflection and emphasis. Words from transcriptions of the recordings were sorted by content analysis software into psychologically meaningful categories; we compared ‘pleasure’ and ‘distress’ word categories. Patients with flat affect spoke with less inflection, and were less fluent. However, they were similar to the other groups in the rate at which they used ‘pleasure’ words to describe happy experiences and ‘distress’ words to describe sad experiences. The behavioral deficiency in flat affect appears to be restricted to reduced activity in communicative motor channels. Other aspects of emotion processing seem intact.

The components and neuroanatomic bases of prosody

Following a discussion of the various aspects and types of prosody, the literature relevant to its neuroanatomy and neuropsychology in normal, brain-injured, and psychiatric populations is reviewed. Evidence linking neurophysiologic mechanisms with components of prosody is presented.