Prosody perception

Prosody refers to the suprasegmental aspects of speech that can convey both linguistic and emotional information. In this way, prosody falls at the junction of audition, language processing, and non-linguistic (social/emotional) cognition.

How neural circuits give rise to our ability to extract rich and complex information from speech signals beyond the linguistic content remains poorly understood. A number of past brain imaging studies have examined neural responses to prosodic manipulations. However, these studies have mostly relied on the traditional group-averaging approach, leading to interpretive challenges and difficulty in comparing/relating findings across studies as critically needed for rigorous evaluation of multiple hypotheses about the underlying computations. This line of work (led by Tamar Regev) aims to characterize the neural circuits of prosody perception using state-of-the-art fMRI approaches. In addition, we are trying to understand the relationship between the information carried by prosody vs. by the linguistic content using artificial neural networks.

This paper presents an early attempt to localize prosody-sensitive areas, but more is to come soon, so stay tuned.