In this paper, we investigate how French listeners with various levels of knowledge in the Japanese language, as well as Japanese native speakers, recognize the social affective meanings of utterances expressed during face-to-face interactions. A lexically neutral sentence consisting of 3 morae uttered with 8 different social affects by 6 native Japanese speakers during a conversation was used ...

BACKGROUND The study of emotional speech perception and emotional prosody necessitates stimuli with reliable affective norms. However, ratings may be affected by the participants' current emotional state as increased anxiety and depression have been shown to yield altered neural responding to emotional stimuli. Therefore, the present study had two aims, first to provide a database of emotional ...

Prosody or intonation is a prime carrier of affective information, a function that has often been neglected in speech research. Most work on prosody has been informed by linguistic models of sentence intonation that focus on accent structure and which are based on widely differing theoretical assumptions. Human speech production includes both prosodic coding of emotions, such as anger or happin...

Recent neural network models for the production of primate vocalizations are largely based on research in nonhuman primates. These models seem yet not fully capable of explaining the neural network dynamics especially underlying different types of human vocalizations. Unlike animal vocalizations, human affective vocalizations might involve higher levels of vocal control and monitoring demands, ...

BACKGROUND Prosody, the melody and intonation of speech, involves the rhythm, rate, pitch and voice quality to relay linguistic and emotional information from one individual to another. A significant component of human social communication depends upon interpreting and responding to another person's prosodic tone as well as one's own ability to produce prosodic speech. However there has been li...

Emotionally relevant stimuli are prioritized in human information processing. It has repeatedly been shown that selective spatial attention is modulated by the emotional content of a stimulus. Until now, studies investigating this phenomenon have only examined within-modality effects, most frequently using pictures of emotional stimuli to modulate visual attention. In this study, we used simult...

Emotionally relevant stimuli are prioritized in human information processing. It has repeatedly been shown that selective spatial attention is modulated by the emotional content of a stimulus. Until now, studies investigating this phenomenon have only examined withinmodality effects, most frequently using pictures of emotional stimuli to modulate visual attention. In this study, we used simulta...

Research has long supported a pivotal right hemisphere contribution to the decoding of emotional prosody, although a broader network of cortical and subcortical structures is now thought to support different components of this functional system during input processing. This paper highlights important work implicating the basal ganglia in emotional prosody decoding, especially in reinforcing key...