Perception of Prosodic Modulations of Linguistic and Paralinguistic Origin: Evidence From Early Auditory Event-Related Potentials

How listeners handle prosodic cues of linguistic and paralinguistic origin is a central question for spoken communication. In the present EEG study, we addressed this question by examining neural responses to variations in pitch accent (linguistic) and affective (paralinguistic) prosody in Swedish words, using a passive auditory oddball paradigm. The results indicated that changes in pitch accent and affective prosody elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) responses at around 200 ms, confirming the brain’s pre-attentive response to any prosodic modulation. The MMN amplitude was, however, statistically larger to the deviation in affective prosody in comparison to the deviation in pitch accent and affective prosody combined, which is in line with previous research indicating not only a larger MMN response to affective prosody in comparison to neutral prosody but also a smaller MMN response to multidimensional deviants than unidimensional ones. The results, further, showed a significant P3a response to the affective prosody change in comparison to the pitch accent change at around 300 ms, in accordance with previous findings showing an enhanced positive response to emotional stimuli. The present findings provide evidence for distinct neural processing of different prosodic cues, and statistically confirm the intrinsic perceptual and motivational salience of paralinguistic information in spoken communication.

“Hard to Say, Hard to Understand, Hard to Live”: Possible Associations between Neurologic Language Impairments and Suicide Risk

In clinical practice, patients with language impairments often exhibit suicidal ideation (SI) and suicidal behavior (SB, covering the entire range from suicide attempts, SA, to completed suicides). However, only few studies exist regarding this subject. We conducted a mini-review on the possible associations between neurologic language impairment (on the motor, comprehension, and semantic sides) and SI/SB. Based on the literature review, we hypothesized that language impairments exacerbate psychiatric comorbidities, which, in turn, aggravate language impairments. Patients trapped in this vicious cycle can develop SI/SB. The so-called “affective prosody” provides some relevant insights concerning the interaction between the different language levels and the world of emotions. This hypothesis is illustrated in a clinical case that we reported, consisting of the case of a 74-year old woman who was admitted to a psychiatric emergency department (ED) after a failed SA. Having suffered an ischemic stroke two years earlier, she suffered from incomplete Broca’s aphasia and dysprosody. She also presented with generalized anxiety and depressive symptoms. We observed that her language impairments were both aggravated by the exacerbations of her anxiety and depressive symptoms. In this patient, who had deficits on the motor side, these exacerbations were triggered by her inability to express herself, her emotional status, and suffering. SI was fluctuant, and—one year after the SA—she completed suicide. Further studies are needed to ascertain possible reciprocal and interacting associations between language impairments, psychiatric comorbidities, and SI/SB. They could enable clinicians to better understand their patient’s specific suffering, as brought on by language impairment, and contribute to the refining of suicide risk detection in this sub-group of affected patients.

A Signal Detection Approach to the Perception of Affective Prosody in Anxious Individuals: A Developmental Study

<p>The present study used a Signal Detection approach to the study of prosody perception in children and adults who self-reported high levels of anxiety. Seventy-one children aged eight and nine years, and 85 adults listened to filtered speech and were required to discriminate angry, fearful and happy tones of voice. Anxiety levels were not associated with perception of affective prosody in adults. Levels of anxiety were related to children's criterion but not sensitivity to prosody. Highly anxious children were significantly more liberal in reporting fearful prosody compared to low anxious children. Analyses of total responses suggest that this criterion is reflective of an interpretation bias as opposed to a response bias. Given that the interpretation bias was observed in children and not adults, it is possible that the bias may mark a vulnerability to develop further anxiety. This is consistent with previous experimental findings in other modalities as well as integrative models of anxiety development that identify such cognitive biases as predisposing factors. Furthermore, regardless of anxiety level, children were comparable to adults in their accuracy for fearful prosody, yet were significantly poorer than adults in their accuracy for angry and happy prosody. This suggests that fear may be one of the first emotions children learn to identify.</p>

A Signal Detection Approach to the Perception of Affective Prosody in Anxious Individuals: A Developmental Study

<p>The present study used a Signal Detection approach to the study of prosody perception in children and adults who self-reported high levels of anxiety. Seventy-one children aged eight and nine years, and 85 adults listened to filtered speech and were required to discriminate angry, fearful and happy tones of voice. Anxiety levels were not associated with perception of affective prosody in adults. Levels of anxiety were related to children's criterion but not sensitivity to prosody. Highly anxious children were significantly more liberal in reporting fearful prosody compared to low anxious children. Analyses of total responses suggest that this criterion is reflective of an interpretation bias as opposed to a response bias. Given that the interpretation bias was observed in children and not adults, it is possible that the bias may mark a vulnerability to develop further anxiety. This is consistent with previous experimental findings in other modalities as well as integrative models of anxiety development that identify such cognitive biases as predisposing factors. Furthermore, regardless of anxiety level, children were comparable to adults in their accuracy for fearful prosody, yet were significantly poorer than adults in their accuracy for angry and happy prosody. This suggests that fear may be one of the first emotions children learn to identify.</p>

Common neural bases for processing speech prosody and music: An integrated model

Do speech and music understanding share common neural mechanisms? Here, brain bioelectrical activity was recorded in healthy participants listening to music obtained by digitally transforming speech into viola music. Sentences originally had a positive or negative affective prosody. The aim was to investigate if the emotional content of music was processed similarly to the affective prosody of speech. EEG was recorded from 128 electrodes in 20 healthy students. Participants had to detect rare neutral piano sounds while ignoring viola melodies. Negative affective valence of stimuli increased the amplitude of frontal P300 and N400 components of ERPs, while positive valence enhanced a late inferior frontal positivity. Similar markers were previously found for the processing of positive versus negative music, vocalizations, and speech. Source reconstruction showed that negative music activated the right superior temporal gyrus and cingulate cortex, while positive music activated the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus and the inferior frontal cortex. An integrated model is proposed of a possible common network for processing the emotional content of music, vocalizations, and speech, which might explain some universal and relatively innate brain reaction to music.

Explicit Training to Improve Affective Prosody Recognition in Adults with Acute Right Hemisphere Stroke

Difficulty recognizing affective prosody (receptive aprosodia) can occur following right hemisphere damage (RHD). Not all individuals spontaneously recover their ability to recognize affective prosody, warranting behavioral intervention. However, there is a dearth of evidence-based receptive aprosodia treatment research in this clinical population. The purpose of the current study was to investigate an explicit training protocol targeting affective prosody recognition in adults with RHD and receptive aprosodia. Eighteen adults with receptive aprosodia due to acute RHD completed affective prosody recognition before and after a short training session that targeted proposed underlying perceptual and conceptual processes. Behavioral impairment and lesion characteristics were investigated as possible influences on training effectiveness. Affective prosody recognition improved following training, and recognition accuracy was higher for pseudo- vs. real-word sentences. Perceptual deficits were associated with the most posterior infarcts, conceptual deficits were associated with frontal infarcts, and a combination of perceptual-conceptual deficits were related to temporoparietal and subcortical infarcts. Several right hemisphere ventral stream regions and pathways along with frontal and parietal hypoperfusion predicted training effectiveness. Explicit acoustic-prosodic-emotion training improves affective prosody recognition, but it may not be appropriate for everyone. Factors such as linguistic context and lesion location should be considered when planning prosody training.

Common neural bases for processing speech prosody and music: An integrated model

It is shared notion that speech and music processing share some commonalities. Brain bioelectrical activity was recorded in healthy participants listening to music obtained by digitally transforming real speech into melodies played by viola. Sentences were originally pronounced with a positive or negative affective prosody. The research's aim was to investigate if the emotional content of music was extracted similarly to how the affective prosody of speech is processed. EEG was recorded from 128 electrodes in 20 healthy students. Participants had to detect rare neutral piano sounds while ignoring viola melodies. Stimulus negative valence increased the amplitude of frontal P300 and N400 ERP components while a late inferior frontal positivity was enhanced in response to positive melodies. Similar ERP markers were previously found for processing positive and negative music, vocalizations and speech. Source reconstruction applied to N400 showed that negative melodies engaged the right superior temporal gyrus and right anterior cingulate cortex, while positive melodies engaged the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus and the inferior frontal cortex. An integrated model is proposed depicting a possible common circuit for processing the emotional content of music, vocalizations and speech, which might explain some universal and relatively innate brain reaction to music.

Recognition of affective prosody in autism spectrum conditions: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Affective prosody recognition is an important area of research in autism spectrum conditions where difficulties in social cognition have been frequently observed. To probe into the mixed results reported in the literature, we conducted a systematic review with meta-analysis and examined potential factors that could explain the inconsistent results. Our literature search included six electronic databases for studies that compared the affective prosody recognition performance in individuals with autism spectrum condition with typically developing participants, which yielded 23 papers eligible for quantitative synthesis. Using a random-effects model, we obtained a moderate-to-large pooled effect (Hedges’ g = −0.63) for the overall affective prosody recognition performance of autism spectrum condition participants, which, however, reduced substantially (to −0.26) and became non-significant after the correction for publication bias. The number of answer codes was found to be a significant moderator for the effect estimate, whereas the number of speakers was not. Moreover, the magnitude of the pooled effect estimate varied across emotions. The findings suggested moderate differences in affective prosody recognition ability between autism spectrum condition and typically developing individuals, which reduced to marginal difficulties for autism spectrum condition when the impact of publication bias was taken into account. Diversity in the number of answer codes could have differential effects on affective prosody recognition performance in autism spectrum condition, which varied across emotions. The present review and meta-analysis demonstrated the insufficiency of research on affective prosody recognition in autism spectrum condition, highlighting a need for further exploration of the contributors and underlying mechanisms for specific affective prosody recognition difficulties. Lay abstract Differences in understanding others’ emotions and attitudes through features in speech (e.g. intonation) have been observed in individuals with autism spectrum conditions, which contribute greatly to their social communication challenges. However, some studies reported that individuals with autism spectrum condition performed comparably to typically developing individuals on affective prosody recognition. Here, we provide a comprehensive review with statistical analysis of 23 existing studies on this topic to examine potential factors that could explain the discrepancies. Compared with typically developing individuals, autism spectrum condition participants generally appeared to encounter more difficulties in affective prosody recognition. But this finding was likely due to the tendency of the existing research to overly focus on deficits in autism. The affective prosody recognition performance in individuals with autism spectrum condition was closely related to the number of answer options offered to them. Moreover, the degree of difficulty in affective prosody recognition encountered by individuals with autism spectrum condition varied across emotions. The findings of this systematic review highlighted the need for further research on affective prosody recognition in autism (e.g. studies that include tonal language speakers and autism spectrum condition individuals with lower cognitive or verbal abilities).