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，他们是高兴还是悲伤），也表达了他们对听众、对其他人或对正在讨论的话题的不同态度。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，而且可能是跨文化的特征，但我们对心灵/大脑如何组织这些独特的人类能力的科学理解仍然缺乏。特别是，研究人员还没有准确地确定在解释声调的情感意义时涉及到哪些心理过程，大脑的哪些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大脑中，然后在言语感知和理解过程中被检索出来的。人类如何根据说话人的语气来判断说话人是在自信、礼貌还是冷漠（例如），这是一个研究领域，科学数据尤其少。本提案中描述的研究旨在推进对这些问题的了解，以阐明人类如何从语音语调中理解不同的情感品质，这是人类交流的一个基本方面。拟议的研究将评估健康和脑损伤的成年人，他们遭受中风，以评估他们如何判断和回应不同情绪语调的句子。通过这些比较方法，我们将更清楚地了解大脑是如何处理口头语言的情感特征的，哪些大脑结构主要参与其中，我们将更接近于确定情感意义是如何通过语音和跨语言的声音线索来表达的本质。

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.