A distinct set of brain areas process prosody--the melody of speech

Abstract

Human speech carries information beyond the words themselves: pitch, loudness, duration, and pauses--jointly referred to as prosody--emphasize critical words, help group words into phrases, and convey emotional and other socially-relevant information. Using a novel fMRI paradigm, we identify a set of prosody-responsive brain areas and then richly characterize them across 8 experiments (25 experimental conditions; n=51 participants). These areas--located on the lateral temporal surface bilaterally and in the frontal lobe--respond to the presence of prosody in both meaningful and meaningless speech, and are distinct from nearby temporal pitch- and speech-perception areas and from frontal areas sensitive to general cognitive and attentional demands. They are also dissociable from--but show partial overlap with--the language areas and with the area that processes dynamic facial expressions. Thus, prosodic information is processed by a distinct set of brain areas, which may help integrate linguistic meanings with non-verbal communicative signals.