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Neural mechanisms of attitudinal prosody perception in a second language: an fMRI study
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Poster C37 in Poster Session C, Wednesday, October 25, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Victoria-Anne Flood1, Diego Elisandro Dardon1, Motoaki Sugiura1, Hyeonjeong Jeong1; 1Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
Attitudinal prosody is important in social communication as it conveys the speaker’s attitude or intention. It contrasts with linguistic prosody, which adds mainly syntactic or semantic information to the utterance. Previous first language (L1) brain research has shown that social cognition areas, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior middle temporal gyrus (aMTG), are essential for the understanding of speaker intention from prosody (Hellbernd & Sammler, 2018). However, perceiving attitudinal prosody in the second language (L2) has been challenging for L2 learners, probably due to limited L2 exposure and proficiency (Shochi et al., 2016). Furthermore, processing sentence-level prosody requires the integration of semantic and syntactic information during sentence comprehension. Consequently, L2 learners may experience increased cognitive load in sentence processing involving the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which may extend to L2 attitudinal prosody processing. In this study, we employed fMRI to examine the brain networks involved in the processing of prosodic attitudes in L2 by comparing linguistic and attitudinal prosodic sentences in L2 and L1. Moreover, we investigated whether the level of individual L2 exposure affects this mechanism and, if so, how. The participants were 32 healthy, right-handed Japanese native speakers (11 females, mean age 20.4) who had acquired an intermediate level in English as L2. Each participant's level of L2 exposure was assessed through a questionnaire measuring their daily English listening and use. We prepared stimuli of sentences with two types of prosody (Attitudinal-A vs. Linguistic-L) and in two languages (L1-J vs. L2-E), forming four conditions (AE, LE, AJ, and LJ) presented in a block paradigm. Inside the fMRI scanner, the participants performed a two-alternative forced judgment task where they were required to distinguish either the attitudinal prosody or linguistic prosody of each sentence. For the linguistic condition, they had to either identify the focus location or the sentence type (statement or question), and for the attitudinal condition to categorize either the friendliness or the confidence of the utterance. Statistical analyses were performed with SPM12, using a random effects model (voxel-level FWE-corrected p < 0.05) Three major findings emerge. First, consistent with previous studies, the L2 and L1 attitudinal prosody conditions [AE+AJ] enhanced significantly greater activation in the mPFC and aMTG than the linguistics prosody conditions [LE+LJ]. Second, as an interaction effect tested by the contrast ([AE>LE]>[AJ>LJ]), the L2 attitudinal prosody condition produced greater activation in the opercular part of the left IFG and premotor area (Small Volume Correction, FWE-corrected p < 0.05). This finding suggests that L2 learners are linguistically loaded while processing attitudinal prosody. Third, when the effect of the amount of L2 exposure was tested with the [AE>LE] contrast, we found a significant correlation in the thalamus during L2 attitudinal prosody processing, supported by the accuracy rate of AE data, which presents a substantial positive correlation with the amount of L2 exposure. Our findings suggest that language exposure may be important in acquiring L2 attitudinal prosody and provide insights into the brain networks associated with attitudinal prosody processing.
Topic Areas: Prosody, Speech Perception