White matter pathways for prosodic structure building: A case study

Abstract

The relevance of left dorsal and ventral fiber pathways for syntactic and semantic comprehension is well established, while pathways for prosody are little explored. The present study examined linguistic prosodic structure building in a patient whose right arcuate/superior longitudinal fascicles and posterior corpus callosum were transiently compromised by a vasogenic peritumoral edema. Compared to ten matched healthy controls, the patient's ability to detect irregular prosodic structure significantly improved between pre- and post-surgical assessment. This recovery was accompanied by an increase in average fractional anisotropy (FA) in right dorsal and posterior transcallosal fiber tracts. Neither general cognitive abilities nor (non-prosodic) syntactic comprehension nor FA in right ventral and left dorsal fiber tracts showed a similar pre-post increase. Together, these findings suggest a contribution of right dorsal and inter-hemispheric pathways to prosody perception, including the right-dorsal tracking and structuring of prosodic pitch contours that is transcallosally informed by concurrent syntactic information.

Right ventral stream damage underlies both poststroke aprosodia and amusia

“…Overall, the present data support the proposal that fundamental acoustic dimensions of prosody (and music) as well as affective information are processed in the right hemisphere [13,14]. However, the right hemisphere stands in dynamic exchange with left‐lateralized language networks via the CC [10–12], complementing and refining prosody perception by higher level linguistic processes [40]. Accordingly, the linguistic complexity of stimuli as well as the type of task [41] could influence the lateralization.…”

Intonation processing increases task‐specific fronto‐temporal connectivity in tonal language speakers

“…It mirrors connectivity reported in previous studies with non‐tonal language materials (Saur et al, 2010; Tyler & Marslen‐Wilson, 2008; Xiang, Fonteijn, Norris, & Hagoort, 2010). Structurally, these connections may rest on large intra‐ and interhemispheric fibre bundles such as the arcuate/superior longitudinal fascicle previously associated with phonological processes (Glasser & Rilling, 2008; Saur et al, 2008), and the posterior corpus callosum interconnecting left and right temporal lobes (Friederici & Alter, 2004; Friederici, von Cramon, & Kotz, 2007; Sammler et al, 2018; Sammler, Kotz, Eckstein, Ott, & Friederici, 2010).…”

“…a All clusters are thresholded at p cluster < .05, FWE-corrected, except for the cluster of L middle frontal gyrus (p cluster = .097, FWE-corrected). (Glasser & Rilling, 2008;Saur et al, 2008), and the posterior corpus callosum interconnecting left and right temporal lobes (Friederici & Alter, 2004;Friederici, von Cramon, & Kotz, 2007;Sammler et al, 2018;Sammler, Kotz, Eckstein, Ott, & Friederici, 2010).…”

Neural correlates of intonation and lexical tone in tonal and non‐tonal language speakers

“…Furthermore, we included control continua that varied in voice gender between male and female (hereafter gender), that is, mainly modulating overall pitch height (Charest, Pernet, Latinus, Crabbe, & Belin, ). We used monosyllabic stimuli to avoid potential syntactic and compositional semantic processing that may interact with intonation at the sentence level (Sammler et al, ; Sammler, Kotz, Eckstein, Ott, & Friederici, ; van der Burght et al, ). Three tasks were employed: Intonation categorisation (statement or question) and tone categorisation (T2 or T4) as experimental tasks, and gender categorisation (female or male) as a control task.…”