What you say versus how you say it: Comparing sentence comprehension and emotional prosody processing using fMRI

• Published in: NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 209; p. 116509
• Main Authors: Seydell-Greenwald, Anna, Chambers, Catherine E., Ferrara, Katrina, Newport, Elissa L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.04.2020; Elsevier Limited; Elsevier
• Subjects: Acoustics; Adolescent; Adult; Affective prosody; Amygdala; Amygdala - diagnostic imaging; Amygdala - physiology; Auditory stimuli; Brain Mapping; Cerebral Cortex - diagnostic imaging; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Comprehension - physiology; Emotions; Emotions - physiology; Female; Functional Laterality - physiology; Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Functional MRI; Hemispheric laterality; Humans; Hypotheses; Information processing; Language; Lateralization; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Medical imaging; Social Perception; Speech; Speech Perception - physiology; Young Adult; Young adults; Affective prosody; Functional MRI; Language; LI; Lateralization
• ISSN: 1053-8119; 1095-9572; 1095-9572
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116509

While language processing is often described as lateralized to the left hemisphere (LH), the processing of emotion carried by vocal intonation is typically attributed to the right hemisphere (RH) and more specifically, to areas mirroring the LH language areas. However, the evidence base for this hypothesis is inconsistent, with some studies supporting right-lateralization but others favoring bilateral involvement in emotional prosody processing. Here we compared fMRI activations for an emotional prosody task with those for a sentence comprehension task in 20 neurologically healthy adults, quantifying lateralization using a lateralization index. We observed right-lateralized frontotemporal activations for emotional prosody that roughly mirrored the left-lateralized activations for sentence comprehension. In addition, emotional prosody also evoked bilateral activation in pars orbitalis (BA47), amygdala, and anterior insula. These findings are consistent with the idea that analysis of the auditory speech signal is split between the hemispheres, possibly according to their preferred temporal resolution, with the left preferentially encoding phonetic and the right encoding prosodic information. Once processed, emotional prosody information is fed to domain-general emotion processing areas and integrated with semantic information, resulting in additional bilateral activations. [Display omitted] •Within-subject comparison of emotional prosody and sentence comprehension fMRI.•Emotional prosody judgments evoke right-lateralized frontotemporal fMRI activations.•Right-lateralization is not driven exclusively by acoustic feature differences.•Sentence comprehension evokes left-lateralized frontotemporal fMRI activations.•Emotional prosody and sentence processing activations partly mirror one another.