A distinct set of brain areas process prosody--the melody of speech
Regev, T. I.; Kim, H. S.; Jhingan, N.; Swords, S.; Kean, H.; Casto, C.; Cole, J. S.; Fedorenko, E.
Show abstract
Human speech carries information beyond the words themselves: pitch, loudness, duration, and pauses--jointly referred to as prosody--emphasize critical words, help group words into phrases, and convey emotional and other socially-relevant information. Using a novel fMRI paradigm, we identify a set of prosody-responsive brain areas and then richly characterize them across 8 experiments (25 experimental conditions; n=51 participants). These areas--located on the lateral temporal surface bilaterally and in the frontal lobe--respond to the presence of prosody in both meaningful and meaningless speech, and are distinct from nearby temporal pitch- and speech-perception areas and from frontal areas sensitive to general cognitive and attentional demands. They are also dissociable from--but show partial overlap with--the language areas and with the area that processes dynamic facial expressions. Thus, prosodic information is processed by a distinct set of brain areas, which may help integrate linguistic meanings with non-verbal communicative signals.
Matching journals
The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Metamodal Coupling of Vibrotactile and Auditory Speech Processing Systems Through Matched Stimulus Representations 97%
- Linguistic structure and meaning organize neural oscillations into a content-specific hierarchy 97%
- Neural bases of proactive and predictive processing of meaningful sub-word units in speech comprehension 97%
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Language beyond the language system: dorsal visuospatial pathways support processing of demonstratives and spatial language during naturalistic fast fMRI 98%
- A common neural code for meaning in discourse production and comprehension 97%
- No evidence for functional distinctions across fronto-temporal language regions in their temporal receptive windows 97%
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.