Much of the recent emphasis on prosody (the melody and rhythm of speech) and its disorders (dysprosody) has been on cognitive-affective functions attributed to cortical areas of the right cerebral hemisphere, with little further behavioral or neuroanatomical specification. This focus is inappropriately narrow both from the perspectives of neuropathogenesis and neurobehavioral phenomenology, and...

Perceptual judgements and acoustic analyses of affective prosody during sentence repetition were examined in four patients with transcortical aphasias and in two normal controls. Although all aphasic patients had a relative preservation of sentence repetition, perceptual ratings revealed that they repeated using correct affective intonation significantly less frequently than normal control subj...

This study was conducted to investigate the connectivity architecture of neural structures involved in processing of emotional speech melody (prosody). 24 subjects underwent event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while rating the emotional valence of either prosody or semantics of binaurally presented adjectives. Conventional analysis of fMRI data revealed activation within ...

BACKGROUND Abstinent alcoholics have deficits in comprehending the affective intonation in speech. Prior work suggests that these deficits are due to alcohol exposure rather than preexisting risk factors for alcoholism. The present paper examines whether family history of alcoholism is a contributor to affective prosody deficits in alcoholics. METHODS Fifty-eight healthy, nonabusing young adu...

Language, prosody and social cues to affective speech are essential for successful interpretation of intent (Attardo, Eisterhold, Hay & Pogi, 2005). Nygaard and Lunders (2002) have shown that affective prosody impacts the resolution of lexical ambiguity during spoken language, yet social cues are understudied. The current studies evaluate the impact of affective prosody and social factors (e.g....

The phenomenon of affective priming has caught scientific interest for over 30 years, yet the nature of the affective priming effect remains elusive. This study investigated the underlying mechanism of cross-modal affective priming and the influence of affective incongruence in music and speech on negativities in the N400 time-window. In Experiment 1, participants judged the valence of affectiv...

The present study explored the effect of speaker prosody on the representation of words in memory. To this end, participants were presented with a series of words and asked to remember the words for a subsequent recognition test. During study, words were presented auditorily with an emotional or neutral prosody, whereas during test, words were presented visually. Recognition performance was com...