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Unattended emotional intonations modulate linguistic prosody processing
Hans Pihan1, Matthias Tabert, Stephanie Assuras
1Department of Neurology, Mount Sinai Medical Center, NY, USA. hans_pihan@freesurf.ch
Brain and Language
|October 4, 2007
Summary
This study shows that while the brain processes pitch direction bilaterally, emotional intonation can interfere with linguistic prosody discrimination. Neutral sentences are easier to process than emotional ones.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Speech Communication
Background:
- Prosody, or speech melody, serves both linguistic and emotional functions.
- Previous research suggests hemispheric specialization for prosodic processing, but findings vary.
- Direct current (DC) potential studies offer insights into brain mechanisms of speech perception.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the linguistic processing of pitch contours in neutral and emotional speech.
- To examine brain activation patterns during the discrimination of linguistic prosody.
- To determine if emotional intonation affects the processing of linguistic pitch direction.
Main Methods:
- Digitally manipulated pitch contours of sentences with neutral, happy, and fearful intonation were used.
- Direct current (DC) potential recordings measured brain responses.
- Acoustic analysis of stimuli was performed to characterize prosodic features.
Main Results:
- Linguistic prosody discrimination was more accurate for neutral stimuli than for emotional ones.
- Brain activation increased when processing happy speech compared to neutral speech.
- Neither neutral nor emotional stimuli showed lateralized processing, suggesting bilateral mechanisms for pitch direction.
Conclusions:
- Linguistic processing of pitch direction involves bilateral brain mechanisms.
- Emotional prosodic components, like pitch variability, can impair the discrimination of linguistic prosody.
- The brain's ability to distinguish linguistic meaning from emotional tone is affected by stimulus characteristics.
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