Neuro-cognitive studies of vocal emotion processing in speech

通过改变说话时的“语调”，人类将自己的情绪传达给他人(例如，他们是快乐的还是悲伤的)，并表达他们对听者、对其他人或正在讨论的话题持有的不同态度。尽管在言语中表达不同情感品质的能力是人类交流的一个基本特征，也可能是跨文化的特征，但我们仍然缺乏对大脑/大脑如何组织以适应这些明显的人类能力的科学理解。尤其是，研究人员还没有准确地确定在解释语调的情感意义时涉及哪些心理过程，大脑的什么结构支持这些心理过程，我们也不知道这些意义是如何储存在头脑/大脑中，然后在言语感知和理解的过程中被提取出来的。这是人类判断说话者是以自信的、礼貌的、或者(例如)基于语调的冷漠态度是一个科学数据特别少的研究领域。这项建议中描述的研究旨在促进对这些问题的了解，以阐明人类如何将不同的情绪特征与语调作为人类交流的一个基本方面来理解。建议的研究将评估患有中风的健康和大脑受损的成年人，以评估他们如何判断和回应以不同情绪语调说出的句子。通过这些比较方法，我们将更清楚地了解大脑如何处理口语的情绪特征，主要涉及哪些大脑结构，我们将更接近于确定情感意义是如何在言语中和跨语言中通过声音线索表现出来的。

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.