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Functional MRI investigation of emotional prosody processing in older adults with and without stroke
Poster Session C, Saturday, September 13, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Sarah Phillips1,2, Anna Seydell-Greenwald1; 1Georgetown University Medical Center, 2University of Arizona
Prosody serves many communicative functions (e.g., linguistic, emotional) but is poorly represented in our neurobiological models of speech and language. Much of the literature argues that the different functional uses of prosody are associated with differences in lateralization (see Paulmann, 2016 for review) with greater emphasis on emotional prosody being processed predominantly in the right hemisphere (RH). However, studies with stroke survivors have revealed poorer emotional prosody processing abilities as a result of lesions in both the right (Ross & Monnot, 2008) and left hemisphere (LH; Leung et al., 2017). There is also evidence that cerebral lateralization is reduced in older adults (Cabeza, 2002), the RH can become dominant for language after perinatal stroke (Newport et al., 2022), and the RH can be recruited for language after LH stroke in adulthood (Wilson & Schneck, 2020). Given the high importance of intact emotion recognition for social functioning in general and after stroke in particular (O’Connell et al., 2021), these prior findings raise the following intriguing questions: 1) To what extent is emotional prosody lateralized to the right hemisphere (RH) in neurologically-intact adults? 2) How does lateralization of activation for emotional prosody compare to the lateralization of activation in a comparable language task (sentence comprehension)? 3) After stroke, does activation for tasks that the lesioned hemisphere would normally be dominant for increase in the non-lesioned hemisphere (i.e., in the LH for emotional prosody and the RH for sentence comprehension)? We are investigating these questions using fMRI in adult right-hemisphere stroke survivors (RHSS), left-hemisphere stroke survivors (LHSS), and demographically matched Controls. Our three groups—RHSS, LHSS, and Controls—complete three tasks while undergoing fMRI scans: a sentence comprehension task, an emotion recognition task, and a beep detection task. The sentence comprehension task presents sentences (e.g., “dad always gives me books for my birthday”) with a relatively flat prosodic pattern, and then asks participants to indicate whether the sentence was about food, a gift, or a trip. The emotion recognition task presents similar sentences with prosodic patterns that differ from the sentence comprehension task and vary by emotion (happy, angry, sad), and then asks participants to indicate whether the speaker sounded happy, angry, or sad. The beep detection task presents the same sentences played in reverse and thus rendered incomprehensible, with a beep appended to some sentences, and then asks participants to indicate whether they heard a beep. Interim results from 10 RHSS and 17 Controls show right hemisphere dominance for emotional prosody and comparable task performance at the group level; however, lateralization indices are more variable among RHSS, with some participants showing increased LH activation that might be compensatory. We are currently collecting more data from RHSS and older Controls, as well as data from LHSS, in order to conduct statistical comparisons of strength and variability of activation and lateralization between groups, and analyses evaluating potential links between activation, lateralization, and task performance. We also intend to include data from younger adult controls to explore how lateralization may change over time in adulthood.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Disorders: Acquired