Intonation as an interface between language and affect

Grandjean, Didier; Bänziger, Tanja; Scherer, Klaus R.

doi:10.1016/s0079-6123(06)56012-1

Cited by 97 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…More generally, music and speech are both auditory signals that acquire meaning through changes in attributes such as pitch, timing, intensity, and timbre. Prosody refers to all suprasegmental changes that occur in the course of an utterance (40,41). Linguists generally differentiate between two prosodic phenomena, namely linguistic prosody, which belongs to the language itself, and emotional prosody, which depends on the emotional state of the speaker.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody in congenital amusia rekindles the musical protolanguage hypothesis

Thompson

Marin

Stewart

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

126

107

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A number of evolutionary theories assume that music and language have a common origin as an emotional protolanguage that remains evident in overlapping functions and shared neural circuitry. The most basic prediction of this hypothesis is that sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from the capacity to process music. We examined sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody in a sample of individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in processing acoustic and structural attributes of music. Twelve individuals with congenital amusia and 12 matched control participants judged the emotional expressions of 96 spoken phrases. Phrases were semantically neutral but prosodic cues (tone of voice) communicated each of six emotional states: happy, tender, afraid, irritated, sad, and no emotion. Congenitally amusic individuals were significantly worse than matched controls at decoding emotional prosody, with decoding rates for some emotions up to 20% lower than that of matched controls. They also reported difficulty understanding emotional prosody in their daily lives, suggesting some awareness of this deficit. The findings support speculations that music and language share mechanisms that trigger emotional responses to acoustic attributes, as predicted by theories that propose a common evolutionary link between these domains.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody in congenital amusia rekindles the musical protolanguage hypothesis

Thompson

Marin

Stewart

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

126

107

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“…We also include discussions of Neuroscience of emotion recognition 9 data regarding emotional prosody recognition in sections where these enable a more complete understanding of the role of a particular region in emotion recognition processes. (For recent, more comprehensive reviews of emotion recognition from vocal cues, see Bachorowski &Owren, 2008 andGrandjean, Banziger, &Scherer, 2006.) We will focus particularly on three anatomical structures or regions: the amygdala and right somatosensory cortex, primarily because their roles in emotion recognition based on other nonverbal cues have been explored, and the face-and body-selective areas of occipitotemporal cortex.…”

Section: Simulation or Shared-substrates Models Of Emotion Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuroscientific Evidence for Simulation and Shared Substrates in Emotion Recognition: Beyond Faces

Heberlein

Atkinson

2009

Emotion Review

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“…For example, birds and mammals use harsher (covering a wider-frequency band, as opposed to pure-tone-like), lower-frequency vocalisations in hostile contexts compared to friendly settings (Morton, 1977). It has been proposed that these primitive aspects of affective expression have been retained even after the evolutionary transition from basic animal vocalisation to the more sophisticated human language (Grandjean et al, 2006). For example, the physiological changes induced by emotional arousal (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subcortical processing in auditory communication

2015

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a b s t r a c tThe voice is a rich source of information, which the human brain has evolved to decode and interpret. Empirical observations have shown that the human auditory system is especially sensitive to the human voice, and that activity within the voice-sensitive regions of the primary and secondary auditory cortex is modulated by the emotional quality of the vocal signal, and may therefore subserve, with frontal regions, the cognitive ability to correctly identify the speaker's affective state. So far, the network involved in the processing of vocal affect has been mainly characterised at the cortical level. However, anatomical and functional evidence suggests that acoustic information relevant to the affective quality of the auditory signal might be processed prior to the auditory cortex.Here we review the animal and human literature on the main subcortical structures along the auditory pathway, and propose a model whereby the distinction between different types of vocal affect in auditory communication begins at very early stages of auditory processing, and relies on the analysis of individual acoustic features of the sound signal. We further suggest that this early feature-based decoding occurs at a subcortical level along the ascending auditory pathway, and provides a preliminary coarse (but fast) characterisation of the affective quality of the auditory signal before the more refined (but slower) cortical processing is completed.

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Intonation as an interface between language and affect

Cited by 97 publications

References 23 publications

Reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody in congenital amusia rekindles the musical protolanguage hypothesis

Reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody in congenital amusia rekindles the musical protolanguage hypothesis

Neuroscientific Evidence for Simulation and Shared Substrates in Emotion Recognition: Beyond Faces

Subcortical processing in auditory communication

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