The author discusses memory from the point of view of the neurosciences and molecular biology, proposing an integration with the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious. The discovery of the implicit memory has extended the concept of the unconscious and supports the hypothesis that this is where the emotional and affective--sometimes traumatic--presymbolic and preverbal experiences of the pri...

Progress in understanding brain/behavior relationships in adult-acquired dysprosody has led to models of cortical hemispheric representation of prosodic processing based on functional (linguistic vs affective) or physical (timing vs pitch) parameters. These explanatory perspectives have not been reconciled, and also a number of neurobehavior syndromes that include dysprosody among their neurolo...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a theoretical framework for the study of affective intonation. I draw a distinction between 'attitude' and 'emotion', suggesting that only the latter is likely to be reflected directly in the speech signal, while 'attitude' is reflected indirectly, and can only be explained by a process of linguistic analysis. The term 'attitude', as applied to intonati...

In this study we will give an overview of the experimental work on the neuroanatomical correlates of language and speech production that we have done in recent years. First we will introduce the methodology of event-related functional magnetic neuro-imaging and the experimental paradigm that we employed. Then we will present and discuss the results of our experiments on (1) speech motor control...

Dichotic Listening (DL) is a valuable tool to study emotional brain lateralization. Regarding the perception of sadness and anger through affective prosody, the main finding has been a left ear advantage (LEA) for the sad but contradictory data for the anger prosody. Regarding an induced mood in the laboratory, its consequences upon DL were a diminished right ear advantage (REA) for the inducti...

PURPOSE To date, the literature on perception of affective, pragmatic, and grammatical prosody abilities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been sparse and contradictory. It is interesting to note that the primary perception of syllable stress within the word structure, which is crucial for all prosody functions, remains relatively unexplored in ASD. Thus, in the current study, we explored ...

This work assesses the contribution of domain-specific prosodic modelling to synthetic speech quality in a name-and-address information service. A prosodic processor analyzes the textual structure of labelled input strings, and inserts markers which specify the intended prosody for the DECtalk text-to-speech synthesizer. These markers impose discourse-level prosodic organization, annotate the i...

Prosody is an important feature of language, comprising intonation, loudness, and tempo. Emotional prosodic processing forms an integral part of our social interactions. The main aim of this study was to use bold contrast fMRI to clarify the normal functional neuroanatomy of emotional prosody, in passive and active contexts. Subjects performed six separate scanning studies, within which two dif...

Does prosody help word recognition? Humans listening to natural prosody, as opposed to monotone or foreign prosody, are able to understand the content with lower cognitive load and higher accuracy [1]. For automatic Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR), the answer is not that straightforward. Even though successful word recognition and successful prosody recognition have been ...