Topics for future research: question 1

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Topics for future research question 1

• Inger Moen

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How discrete are affective prosody and
linguistic prosody?

• Clinical investigations of sentence- or
  phrase-level pitch (intonation) production has
  been guided by the assumption that intonation is
  a dichotomous phenomenon with discrete affective
  and linguistic categories.

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Studies of prosody and the brain clinical studies

• Studies of patients with brain damage
• Monrad-Krohns study (1947) of a patient with
  left hemisphere damage whose melody of language
  was disturbed while her ability to sing was not
  affected. "The variations of pitch had by no
  means disappeared. On the contrary they were
  rather greater than usual in Norwegian, but they
  were neither adequate nor quite constant in their
  inadequacy"

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Acoustic investigations of clinical speech

• Normal and abnormal characteristics in the
  intonation of both left-hemisphere-damaged and
  right-hemisphere-damaged patients (Danly and
  Shapiro 1982, Ryalls 1982, Cooper, Soares,
  Nicol, Michelow and Goloskie 1984, Shapiro and
  Danly 1985, Cooper and Klouda 1987).
• Are these abnormalities linguistic in nature?
• Reduced physical control?
• Deficiency in long-range planning of linguistic
  units?

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The prosodic features of language

• Linguistic prosodic categories
• Stress
• Rhythm
• Tone
• Duration
• Intonation
• Auditory correlates of prosody
• Pitch
• Loudness
• Tempo
• Rhythm
• Physical dimensions of prosody
• Fundamental frequency
• Intensity
• Time

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Neurological basis for prosodic functions

• Physical correlates of primary importance for
  determining hemispheric specialization?
• Then unilateral brain lesions result in same
  type of prosodic disturbance regardless of
  linguistic function
• Linguistic functions of primary importance for
  determining hemispheric specialization?
• Then behavioural effect of unilateral lesion
  will vary depending on linguistic function of the
  particular physical dimension, e.g. F0
• Different neurological bases for different
  acoustic features?
• E.g. One hemisphere processes F0 and the other
  hemisphere processes time

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Hypotheses concerning the neuroanatomical regions
active in prosodic processing

• All aspects processed in the right hemisphere
  (Klouda, Robin, Graff-Radford and Cooper 1988)
• All aspects subserved by subcortical regions
  (e.g. Cancelliere and Kertesz 1990)
• Emotional prosody controlled by the right
  hemisphere linguistic prosody controlled by the
  left hemisphere (the functional lateralisation
  hypothesis) (Van Lancker 1980)
• Individual acoustic cues are independently
  lateralized (e.g. Van Lancker and Sidtis 1992)

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What is emotional prosody?

• Linguistic elements of language v.s.
  paralinguistic elements
• Tone of voice
• Tone of voice constitutes the background for the
  perception of linguistic elements
• Vocal parameters in the linguistic elements and
  tone of voice differ mainly in the time scale
  involved e.g.
• Loudness
• Pitch
• Laryngeal setting
• Supra laryngeal setting

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Topics for future research question 2

• Inger Moen

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The influence of palate shape on individual
variability

• Do certain palate shapes lead to more individual
  variability?
• How can palate shapes be measured in a way that
  will allow comparison between different palate
  shapes?