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Neurobiology of multifunctional prosody: Scope and trajectory
Poster Session D, Saturday, September 13, 5:00 - 6:30 pm, Field House
Hatice Zora1,2, Stephanie Forkel1,2,3; 1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, 2Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, The Netherlands, 3Brain Connectivity and Behaviour Laboratory, Sorbonne Universities, France
Prosody relies on variations in fundamental frequency (f0), intensity, and duration of auditory signals, and covers a variety of interconnected phenomena, inter alia, stress, tone, rhythm and intonation. Understanding human language from both phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives involves unraveling the processing of prosody. Biologically, prosody taps into precognitive abilities shared with our hominid ancestors, as reflected in similarities with great apes in high-arousal expressions like joy and anger. Likewise, its socio-ecological significance is evident in prelinguistic communication, as infants depend on prosody prior to acquiring symbolic language. Clinically, prosody plays a vital role in diagnosing and treating a range of communication disorders. Beyond its evolutionary, developmental and clinical relevance, prosody functions across multiple linguistic levels, from phonology to pragmatics. Some functions are language-specific such as distinguishing lexical meanings in Mandarin (e.g., mǎi ‘buy’ versus mài ‘sell’), while others are more universal, like marking questions versus statements or emphasizing key discourse information. This multifunctionality positions prosody as a promising entry point into understanding not only the origins of speech but also the structural and operational aspects of linguistic processing. However, this complexity also poses significant challenges. Since diverse functions are ubiquitous and closely intertwined physiologically and psychologically, it is challenging to determine how the brain processes prosodic cues from different sources. Despite growing neuroscientific interest, neural mechanisms underlying prosody’s diverse functions and their interactions remain poorly understood. This is partially due to incomplete data and prosody’s ill-defined status in neuroscience. It is, for example, not a searchable term in meta-analytic neuroimaging platforms like Neurosynth and BrainMap, limiting analysis to individual features like pitch (f0). Recent developments, however, provide valuable frameworks such as the Functionnectome, capturing relationships between brain circuits and functions (Nozais et al., 2021, Commun Biol) and the Morphospace Predictive Framework, enabling statistical testing of functional clustering and predictability based on inter-function similarities (Pacella et al., 2024, Nat Commun). Notably, Pacella et al.’s meta-analytic map of cognitive functions omits prosodic features from the language branch. A necessary first step is, therefore, to map existing fMRI research on prosody within the morphospace and observe its positioning. We hypothesize that prosody may occupy a central position, integrating loosely defined functions across sensory and cognitive domains. Given humans' sophisticated change detection mechanisms at sensory and cognitive levels, and prosody's role in probing their neural substrates (Zora et al., 2023, Int J Psychophysiol), change detection offers an optimal starting point for exploring prosody in the morphospace. Accordingly, we identified 36 fMRI studies on prosodic change detection in Neurosynth. Since attentional mechanisms are integral to information processing and prosody likely engages a domain-general attentional network (Kristensen et al., 2013, Cereb Cortex), one key question is whether prosody clusters more closely with the salience network or the attentional network. One might expect a functional transition from the salience to the broader attentional network as linguistic complexity increases. By addressing this question, this ongoing work aims not only to establish neural foundations for understanding prosody but also to promote future research based on these structured approaches.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Speech Perception