Neuro-cognitive studies of vocal emotion processing in speech

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By changing the "tone of voice" while speaking, humans communicate their emotions to others (e.g., whether they are happy or sad) and also express different attitudes they hold about the listener, about other individuals, or about a topic being discussed.  Although the ability to express different emotional qualities in speech is a fundamental and perhaps trans-cultural feature of human communication, our scientific understanding of how the mind/brain is organized for these distinctly human abilities is still lacking.  In particular, researchers have not precisely identified what mental processes are involved when interpreting the emotive significance of voice tone, what structures of the brain support these mental processes, nor do we know how these meanings are stored in the mind/brain and then retrieved during the act of speech perception and comprehension.  The way in which humans determine that a speaker is speaking in a confident, polite, or perhaps indifferent manner (for example) based on their voice tone is an area of research for which there is especially little scientific data.  The research described in this proposal seeks to advance knowledge of these issues to shed light on how humans understand different emotive qualities from voice tone as a fundamental aspect of human communication.  The proposed studies will evaluate healthy as well as brain-damaged adults who have suffered a stroke to evaluate how they judge and respond to sentences spoken in different emotional tones.  Through these comparative methods, we will arrive at a clearer understanding of how the mind processes emotional features of spoken language, what brain structures are predominantly involved, and we will get closer to determining the very nature of how emotional meanings are represented through vocal cues in speech and across languages.