Neural correlates of the perception of contrastive prosodic focus in French: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Abstract

This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed at examining the cerebral regions involved in the auditory perception of prosodic focus using a natural focus detection task. Two conditions testing the processing of simple utterances in French were explored, narrow-focused versus broad-focused. Participants performed a correction detection task. The utterances in both conditions had exactly the same segmental, lexical, and syntactic contents, and only differed in their prosodic realization. The comparison between the two conditions therefore allowed us to examine processes strictly associated with prosodic focus processing. To assess the specific effect of pitch on hemispheric specialization, a parametric analysis was conducted using a parameter reflecting pitch variations specifically related to focus. The comparison between the two conditions reveals that brain regions recruited during the detection of contrastive prosodic focus can be described as a right-hemisphere dominant dual network consisting of (a) ventral regions which include the right posterosuperior temporal and bilateral middle temporal gyri and (b) dorsal regions including the bilateral inferior frontal, inferior parietal and left superior parietal gyri. Our results argue for a dual stream model of focus perception compatible with the asymmetric sampling in time hypothesis. They suggest that the detection of prosodic focus involves an interplay between the right and left hemispheres, in which the computation of slowly changing prosodic cues in the right hemisphere dynamically feeds an internal model concurrently used by the left hemisphere, which carries out computations over shorter temporal windows.

White matter pathways for prosodic structure building: A case study

“…Prevailing models of prosody perception do not typically include the parietal lobe (Brück et al, 2011;Schirmer & Kotz, 2006;Wildgruber et al, 2006;Wildgruber, Ethofer, Grandjean, & Kreifelts, 2009;Witteman, Van Heuven, & Schiller, 2012); nevertheless, right inferior parietal activations (BA 40/7) have been occasionally reported in prosody studies (Belyk & Brown, 2014;Merrill et al, 2012) and were proposed to reflect rehearsal-based working memory processes for prosodic pitch contours (Kreitewolf et al, 2014;Perrone-Bertolotti et al, 2013). The present study cannot discriminate between neural mass effects and changes in white matter conductivity.…”

Intonation guides sentence processing in the left inferior frontal gyrus

“…Previous fMRI studies, however, have not studied this use of prosody. Rather, fMRI research has focused on types of linguistic prosody which are not as crucial for the syntactic structure of a sentence, such as marking a question or statement (Kreitewolf et al, 2014;Sammler et al, 2015) or placing stress (Kristensen et al, 2013;Perrone-Bertolotti et al, 2013). Moreover, studies often used a lowlevel or non-linguistic baseline condition rather than a comparable linguistic control task (Meyer et al, 2002;Plante et al, 2002).…”

“…The sample size was determined based on previous fMRI studies on sentence processing (e.g. Goucha & Friederici, 2015;Kristensen, Wang, Petersson, & Hagoort, 2013;Perrone-Bertolotti, Dohen, Loevenbruck, Sato, Pichat & Baciu 2013). The exclusion criteria were established prior to data analysis.…”

fMRI reveals lateralized pattern of brain activity modulated by the metrics of stimuli during auditory rhyme processing

“…In a recent fMRI study, Perrone-Bertolotti et al (2013) found a comparable lateralized network to be activated during the auditory perception of prosodic focus when participants had to decide whether or not the sentences they heard contained contrastive focus (on the subject or the object) or not. The authors interpreted their finding of increased activation in temporal, parietal, and frontal regions during focused as compared to neutral condition in the context of the dual stream framework.…”

“…The authors interpreted their finding of increased activation in temporal, parietal, and frontal regions during focused as compared to neutral condition in the context of the dual stream framework. While they attributed the right dominant STG activation to longer timescale computations and involvement of the ventral stream, the activation in the parietal and frontal regions was explained by an interplay between the two hemispheres in a auditory-motor hub and thus involvement of the dorsal stream (Perrone-Bertolotti et al, 2013).…”