Browsing by Author "Räsänen, Mari"

In this thesis I review the research literature about possible connections between the perception of speech prosody and music. First I present some studies regarding the perception of speech prosody and second, about music perception in general. In the first sections I focus mainly on relatively early perceptive processing, connections between perception and the motor system, and perception of emotions in speech and music. Speech prosody as a term refers to the music-like features of speech, such as pitch, loudness and tempo. The prosodic features of language can have emotional as well as linguistic content. This is why in prosody literature the phenomenon is often divided into linguistic prosody and affective or emotional prosody. Because of emotional prosody, it is possible to recognize different emotions from speech signal. Linguistic prosody refers to the role of speech prosody in speech segmentation and clause categorization. In the brain, prosodic features are processed ventrally in the right auditory cortex and frontal cortex. The motor system also contributes to the perception and production of prosody, especially in emotional prosody. Like prosody, music has melodic and rhythmic features that are in part processed separately in the brain. Both pitch and rhythm are processed first in the right auditory cortex. The motor system is also involved in the perception of rhythm and emotion. Consequently, the perception of music and prosody seems to overlap in some parts of the brain. Evidence for overlapping processes can also be seen in transfer effects from music to prosody perception, which seems to improve with musical training. Also problems in music perception in amusia or schizophrenia appear to be related to deficits in perception of prosody. There seems to be several connections between prosody and music perception, possibly related to similar processing of melodic and temporal features. The connection between language and music has traditionally been attributed to similar syntactic structures, but prosody could also be a convincing option. However, more research on this topic is needed.