A possible functional localizer for identifying brain regions sensitive to sentence-level prosody

Investigations of how we produce and perceive prosodic patterns are not only interesting in their own right but can inform fundamental questions in language research. We here argue that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in general - and the functional localization approach in particular (e.g., Kanwisher et al., 1997; Saxe et al., 2006; Fedorenko et al., 2010; Nieto-Castañon & Fedorenko, 2012) - has the potential to help address open research questions in prosody research and at the intersection of prosody and other domains. Critically, this approach can go beyond questions like "where in the brain does mental process x produce activation" and toward questions that probe the nature of the representations and computations that subserve different mental abilities. We describe one way to functionally define regions sensitive to sentence-level prosody in individual subjects. This or similar "localizer" contrasts can be used in future studies to test hypotheses about the precise contributions of prosody-sensitive brain regions to prosodic processing and cognition more broadly.