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Abstract:
The fMRI study aims at localizing brain areas involved in the
processing of linguistic prosody in natural speech. As German
realizes prosody particularly by pitch, the study focuses on the
contribution of this parameter. Four conditions were employed: (1)
Sentences with wide focus and normal intonation. (2) Sentences with
flattened pitch contour. (3) Delexicalized sentences with intact
prosody. (4) Sentences with narrow focus and normal intonation. In
an event-related design 15 participants were presented with
auditive stimuli and had to perform a prosody comparison task. For
each trial eight EPI images were obtained in eight AC-PC parallel
slices using a 3T Bruker scanner. Data analysis revealed increased
activation in the primary auditory cortex in all conditions,
whereas the hemodynamic responses obtained from adjacent temporal
language related areas and from the inferior frontal gyrus (pars
triangularis) varied bilaterally depending on the respective
condition. The inferior precentral gyrus and the superior temporal
cortex are more strongly involved bilaterally when considering the
sentence conditions only. Salient left and moderate right inferior
frontal activation (pars triangularis) could be reported for all
conditions except for delexicalized speech. Interestingly, in all
conditions clusters in the right superior temporal gyrus were
larger as compared to the contralateral hemisphere. This finding
suggests a particular influence of nonaffective prosodic aspects
during the processing of speech.
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