Prosodic attributes of speech, such as intonation, influence our ability to recognize, comprehend, and produce affect, as well as semantic and pragmatic meaning, in vocal utterances. The present study examines associations between auditory perceptual abilities and the perception of prosody, both pragmatic and affective. This association has not been previously examined. Ninety-seven participant...

Neuropsychiatric disorders occur frequently after stroke and have a detrimental impact on functional outcomes and quality of life. Poststroke depression (PSD) is considered the most frequent clinical expression of these disorders and is often diagnosed at least 3 months after stroke. The identification of patients at risk for developing this disorder remains an important issue for clinicians be...

Stimuli from two previously presented comprehension tasks of affective and linguistic prosody (Pell & Baum, 1997) were analyzed acoustically and subjected to several discriminant function analyses, following Van Lancker and Sidtis (1992). An analysis of the errors made on these tasks by left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) and right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) subjects examined whether each clinical grou...

Rhythm in terms of the modulation of syllable durations represents an information-bearing feature of verbal utterances contributing both to the meaning of a sentence (linguistic prosody) as well as a speaker’s emotional expression (affective prosody). In order to delineate the neural structures subserving rhythmic shaping of speech production, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was pe...

Patients with Huntington's Disease (HD) who were without dementia were compared to unilateral stroke patients and controls as previously reported in 1983, to discover if they had a prosodic defect. Subjects were presented tape-recorded speech filtered sentences and asked to indicate the tone of voice as happy, sad or angry (affective prosody), or as a question, command or statement (proposition...

OBJECTIVE Evaluate the influence of depressive symptoms on the recognition of emotional prosody in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, and identify types of emotion on spoken sentences. METHODS Thirty-five PD patients and 65 normal participants were studied. Dementia was checked with the Mini Mental State Examination, Clinical Dementia Rating scale, and DSM IV. Recognition of emotional prosody...

1 VOCAL AFFECT The goal of a new field of study known as affective computing is to design machines that understand and respond to human emotions [9]. There is a range of information available for the development of a human–machine interface based on emotion. Locally, we can monitor physiological measures of human emotional state, or we can judge at a distance using visual or vocal expressions o...

The word "Anna" was spoken by 12 female and 11 male subjects with six different emotional expressions: "rage/hot anger," "despair/lamentation," "contempt/disgust," "joyful surprise," "voluptuous enjoyment/sensual satisfaction," and "affection/tenderness." In an acoustical analysis, 94 parameters were extracted from the speech samples and broken down by correlation analysis to 15 parameters ente...

Clinical observations of distortions of production and perception of prosody implicate that distinct, non-overlapping neural circuits are responsible for distinct prosodic cues and functions. These observations motivate a question whether similar evidence can be found in the neurologically intact brain. The experiment presented in this paper was constructed to check the neuroanatomical basis of...

The objective was to determine whether disturbances of aVective prosody constitute part of the symptomatology of schizophrenia. AVective prosody is defined here as a neuropsychological function that encompasses all non-verbal aspects of language that are necessary for recognising and conveying emotions in communication. Twenty six schizophrenic outpatients and twenty four normal controls underw...