A longstanding issue in psychology is the relationship between how we perceive the world and how we act upon it. Pitch deafness provides an interesting opportunity to test for the independence of perception and production abilities in the speech domain. We tested eight amusics and eight matched controls for their ability to perceive pitch shifts…

Brief tonal stimuli and spoken sentences were utilized to examine whether adolescents (aged 14;3-18;1) with specific language impairments (SLI) exhibit atypical neural activity for rapid auditory processing of non-linguistic stimuli and linguistic processing of verb-agreement and semantic constraints. Further, we examined whether the behavioral…

The current study on German investigates Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) for the perception of sentences with intonations which are infrequent (i.e. vocatives) or inadequate in daily conversation. These ERPs are compared to the processing correlates for sentences in which the syntax-to-prosody relations are congruent and used frequently…

Prosody or speech melody subserves linguistic (e.g., question intonation) and emotional functions in speech communication. Findings from lesion studies and imaging experiments suggest that, depending on function or acoustic stimulus structure, prosodic speech components are differentially processed in the right and left hemispheres. This direct…

Prosodic information in the speech signal carries information about linguistic structure as well as emotional content. Although children are known to use prosodic information from infancy onward to assist linguistic decoding, the brain correlates of this skill in childhood have not yet been the subject of study. Brain activation associated with…

Fourteen native speakers of German heard normal sentences, sentences which were either lacking dynamic pitch variation (flattened speech), or comprised of intonation contour exclusively (degraded speech). Participants were to listen carefully to the sentences and to perform a rehearsal task. Passive listening to flattened speech compared to normal…