1- Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
2- Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, Cluster of Languages of Emotion, Bilingualekinder.com
Abstract: (241 Views)
Introduction: Without prosody, effective verbal communication is unattainable. Prosody transmits both linguistic and emotional information.The present study aims to 1) determine brain regions active during the processing of emotional prosody and 2) discover the mechanism of understanding emotional prosody. This is to be achieved by reviewing a body of research performed on emotional prosody using neuroimaging techniques (fMRI) and recording event-related brain signals (ERP).
Methods: Studies conducted from 2005 to 2021, using healthy individuals as subjects and sentences as stimuli were systematically picked and analyzed. All these studies were available through PubMed and Google Scholar web search engines.
Results: A single hemisphere is not involved in processing prosodic information. Speech sounds are processed in three stages by the ear, brain stem, thalamus, and primary auditory cortex.The first step is to extract phonological characteristics from prosodic cues in the right auditory cortex.Second, recognition of emotions in speech, representation of meaningful phonological sequences in the posterior/posterior parts (STS) of the right hemisphere. In the third step, we evaluate and interpret expressed emotions cognitively. This process involves the simultaneous activity of two hemispheres of the frontal cortex.
Also, the neural mechanism of the brain is affected by factors such as the difficulty of the test task, the quality of the stimuli, and how the test is designed.
Conclusion: Study of emotional prosody requires access to standardized research tools for the language under study. In the second part of this paper we report the process of designing, producing and validating the first comprehensive emotional speech database for Persian (Persian ESD) developed by Keshtari and colleagues (2015).
Received: 2023/11/9 | Accepted: 2024/06/6