Common Premotor Regions for the Perception and Production of Prosody and Correlations with Empathy and Prosodic Ability

TLDR

Prosody, the melodic and intonational aspects of speech, conveys linguistic and emotional information and is essential for interpreting and producing prosodic tone in social communication. The study aimed to determine whether perception and production of prosody rely on shared neural systems and how these relate to individual differences in social ability. Using fMRI, the authors measured neural activity while participants perceived and produced a meaningless phrase in various prosodic intonations. Premotor regions, particularly the left inferior frontal gyrus, showed overlapping activity for perception and production, and this activity correlated with affective empathy scores and prosodic production ability, indicating shared neural substrates for prosody and social cognition.

Abstract

Prosody, the melody and intonation of speech, involves the rhythm, rate, pitch and voice quality to relay linguistic and emotional information from one individual to another. A significant component of human social communication depends upon interpreting and responding to another person's prosodic tone as well as one's own ability to produce prosodic speech. However there has been little work on whether the perception and production of prosody share common neural processes, and if so, how these might correlate with individual differences in social ability.The aim of the present study was to determine the degree to which perception and production of prosody rely on shared neural systems. Using fMRI, neural activity during perception and production of a meaningless phrase in different prosodic intonations was measured. Regions of overlap for production and perception of prosody were found in premotor regions, in particular the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Activity in these regions was further found to correlate with how high an individual scored on two different measures of affective empathy as well as a measure on prosodic production ability.These data indicate, for the first time, that areas that are important for prosody production may also be utilized for prosody perception, as well as other aspects of social communication and social understanding, such as aspects of empathy and prosodic ability.