Emotional prosody in congenital amusia: Impaired and spared processes

AbstractCongenital amusia is a lifelong deficit of music processing, in particular of pitch processing. Most research investigating this neurodevelopmental disorder has focused on music perception, but pitch also has a critical role for intentional and emotional prosody in speech. Two previous studies investigating amusics’ emotional prosody recognition have shown either some deficit or no deficit (compared to controls). However, these previous studies have used only long sentence stimuli, which allow for limited control over acoustic content. Here, we tested amusic individuals for emotional prosody perception in sentences and vowels. For each type of material, participants performed an emotion categorization task, followed by intensity ratings of the recognized emotion. Compared to controls, amusic individuals had similar recognition of emotion in sentences, but poorer performance in vowels, especially when distinguishing sad and neutral stimuli. These lower performances in amusics were linked with difficulties in processing pitch and spectro-temporal parameters of the vowel stimuli. For emotion intensity, neither sentence nor vowel ratings differed between participant groups, suggesting preserved implicit processing of emotional prosody in amusia. These findings can be integrated into previous data showing preserved implicit processing of pitch and emotion in amusia alongside deficits in explicit recognition tasks. They are thus further supporting the hypothesis of impaired conscious analysis of pitch and timbre in this neurodevelopmental disorder.HighlightsAmusics showed preserved emotional prosody recognition in sentencesAmusics showed a deficit for emotional prosody recognition in short voice samplesPreserved intensity ratings of emotions in amusia suggest spared implicit processes

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Correction for Thompson et al., Reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody in congenital amusia rekindles the musical protolanguage hypothesis

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1222350110 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 110 (7) ◽

pp. 2676-2676

Keyword(s):

Emotional Prosody ◽

Congenital Amusia

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Pre-attentive processing of neutral and emotional sounds in congenital amusia

10.1101/2020.08.05.238204 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Agathe Pralus ◽

Marie Gomot ◽

Jackson Graves ◽

Fanny Cholvy ◽

Lesly Fornoni ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Musical Training ◽

Group Differences ◽

Oddball Paradigm ◽

Emotional Prosody ◽

Functional Impairments ◽

Implicit Processing ◽

Congenital Amusia ◽

Emotional Deviance ◽

Implicit And Explicit ◽

And Control

AbstractCongenital amusia is a life-long deficit of musical processing. This deficit can extend to the processing of language and in particular, emotional prosody. In a previous behavioral study, we revealed that while amusic individuals had difficulties in explicitly recognizing emotions for short vowels, they rated the emotional intensity of these same vowels as did their matched control participants. This finding led to the hypothesis that congenital amusics might be impaired for explicit emotional prosody recognition, but not for its implicit processing. With the aim to investigate amusics’ automatic processing of prosody, the present study measured electroencephalography (EEG) when participants listened passively to vowels presented within an oddball paradigm. Emotionally neutral vowel served as the standard and either emotional (anger and sadness) or neutral vowels as deviants. Evoked potentials were compared between participants with congenital amusia and control participants matched in age, education, and musical training. The MMN was rather preserved for all deviants in amusia, whereas an earlier negative component was found decreased in amplitude in amusics compared to controls for the neutral and sadness deviants. For the most salient deviant (anger), the P3a was decreased in amplitude for amusics compared to controls. These results showed some preserved automatic detection of emotional deviance in amusia despite an early deficit to process subtle acoustic changes. In addition, the automatic attentional shift in response to salient deviants at later processing stages was reduced in amusics in comparison to the controls. In the three ERPs related to the deviance, between-group differences were larger over bilateral prefrontal areas, previously shown to display functional impairments in congenital amusia. Our present study thus provides further understanding of the dichotomy between implicit and explicit processing in congenital amusia, in particular for vocal stimuli with emotional content.

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Age-Related Decline in Emotional Prosody Discrimination

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169/a000241 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 61 (3) ◽

pp. 215-223 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Rachel L. C. Mitchell ◽

Rachel A. Kingston

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Auditory Perception ◽

Duration Discrimination ◽

Pitch Perception ◽

Sensory Level ◽

Emotional Prosody ◽

Processing Stage ◽

Acoustic Characteristics ◽

Age Related ◽

Level Of Processing

It is now accepted that older adults have difficulty recognizing prosodic emotion cues, but it is not clear at what processing stage this ability breaks down. We manipulated the acoustic characteristics of tones in pitch, amplitude, and duration discrimination tasks to assess whether impaired basic auditory perception coexisted with our previously demonstrated age-related prosodic emotion perception impairment. It was found that pitch perception was particularly impaired in older adults, and that it displayed the strongest correlation with prosodic emotion discrimination. We conclude that an important cause of age-related impairment in prosodic emotion comprehension exists at the fundamental sensory level of processing.

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