Kao Chieh, Zhang Yang
Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
Brain Sci. 2024 Nov 30;14(12):1216. doi: 10.3390/brainsci14121216.
BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Emotional prosody, the intonation and rhythm of speech that conveys emotions, is vital for speech communication as it provides essential context and nuance to the words being spoken. This study explored how listeners automatically process emotional prosody in speech, focusing on different neural responses for the prosodic categories and potential sex differences.
The pilot data here involved 11 male and 11 female adult participants (age range: 18-28). A multi-feature oddball paradigm was used, in which participants were exposed to sequences of non-repeating English words with emotional (angry, happy, sad) or neutral prosody while watching a silent movie.
Both mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a components were observed, indicating automatic perceptual grouping and neural sensitivity to emotional variations in speech. Women showed stronger MMN to angry than sad prosody, while men showed stronger MMN to angry than happy prosody. Happy prosody elicited the strongest P3a, but only in men.
The findings challenge the notion that all facets of emotion processing are biased toward female superiority. However, these results from 22 young adult native English speakers should be interpreted with caution, as data from a more adequate sample size are needed to test the generalizability of the findings. Combined with results from studies on children and elderly adults, these preliminary data underscore the need to explore the complexities of emotional speech processing mechanisms to account for category and sex differences across the lifespan in a longitudinal perspective.
背景/目的：情感韵律是指语音中传达情感的语调与节奏，它对于言语交流至关重要，因为它为所说的话语提供了必要的语境和细微差别。本研究探讨了听众如何自动处理言语中的情感韵律，重点关注韵律类别不同的神经反应以及潜在的性别差异。
此处的试点数据涉及11名成年男性和11名成年女性参与者（年龄范围：18至28岁）。采用了多特征oddball范式，其中参与者在观看无声电影时，会接触到带有情感（愤怒、高兴、悲伤）或中性韵律的非重复英语单词序列。
观察到失匹配负波（MMN）和P3a成分，表明对言语中情感变化的自动感知分组和神经敏感性。女性对愤怒韵律的MMN比对悲伤韵律更强，而男性对愤怒韵律的MMN比对高兴韵律更强。高兴韵律引发了最强的P3a，但仅在男性中。
这些发现挑战了情感处理的所有方面都偏向女性优势的观念。然而，来自22名以英语为母语的年轻成年人的这些结果应谨慎解释，因为需要来自更充足样本量的数据来测试这些发现的普遍性。结合对儿童和老年人的研究结果，这些初步数据强调了从纵向角度探索情感言语处理机制的复杂性，以解释整个生命周期中的类别和性别差异的必要性。
