Common Premotor Regions for the Perception and Production of Prosody and Correlations with Empathy and Prosodic Ability

Abstract

BackgroundProsody, 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 little work on whether the perception and production of prosody share common neural processes, and if so, how these might correlate with individual differences in social ability.MethodsThe aim of the present study was to determine the degree to which perception and production of prosody rely on shared neural systems. Using fMRI, neural activity during perception and production of a meaningless phrase in different prosodic intonations was measured. Regions of overlap for production and perception of prosody were found in premotor regions, in particular the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Activity in these regions was further found to correlate with how high an individual scored on two different measures of affective empathy as well as a measure on prosodic production ability.ConclusionsThese data indicate, for the first time, that areas that are important for prosody production may also be utilized for prosody perception, as well as other aspects of social communication and social understanding, such as aspects of empathy and prosodic ability.

Pitch underlies activation of the vocal system during affective vocalization

“…While there is a paucity of research examining the production of affective vocalizations in humans, those studies that have been conducted, including this study, are unanimous in reporting coactivation of the cingulate and LPA pathways (Barrett et al, 2004;Aziz-Zadeh et al, 2010;Wattendorf et al, 2013). While Barrett et al (2004) observed that ACC activation correlated with vocal acoustics during expressive speech, the same was observed for the LPA.…”

“…Aziz-Zadeh et al (2010) observed that many brain areas, including the ACC, were active both when speakers vocally expressed an emotion and when they intoned a question, where both forms of intonation involved dynamic pitch modulation, but only one conveyed emotion. A meta-analysis of brain imaging studies of singing and simple syllable production found activation of both the LPA and cingulate vocalization area (Brown et al, 2009).…”

“…This region has anatomical connections with limbic, auditory and premotor areas (Price, 1999;Anwander et al, 2007;Turken and Dronkers, 2011;Yeterian et al 2012), similar to adjacent Broca's area, which sits at the interface of speech perception and production (Watkins and Paus, 2004). None of the handful of studies that have examined the production of affective vocalizations in humans have reported activation in the IFGorb (Barrett et al, 2004;Aziz-Zadeh et al, 2010;Wattendorf et al, 2013). However, given the relatively low power of whole-brain analyses in human brain imaging, we sought to perform a sensitive test of the activation of the IFGorb during affective production using a region-of-interest (ROI) analysis.…”

“…Finally, given that the majority of the literature on affective prosody focuses on perception alone, we were interested in comparing the brain network for affective vocalizing with that for affective perception. Considering the general propensity of sensorimotor systems to activate during both action execution and observation (Cross et al, 2006;Aziz-Zadeh et al, 2010;Menenti et al, 2011), we performed exploratory analyses to search for exclusivity and overlap in our vocal production and perceptual experiments.…”

Neural Correlates of Developmental Coordination Disorder: The Mirror Neuron System Hypothesis

“…Convincing evidence for this hypothesis comes from experiments showing that self-reported trait empathy and perspective-taking ability (usually measured with a widely-used empathy scale, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index; [104]) correlates with activity in the MNS [105][106][107][108][109][110][111]. In addition, in conditions in which empathy is known to be impaired, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), decreased activity in MNS regions has been found to correlate with social symptom severity [112].…”