Intonation processing deficits of emotional words among Mandarin Chinese speakers with congenital amusia: an ERP study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Congenital amusia is a disorder that is known to affect the processing of musical pitch. Although individuals with amusia rarely show language deficits in daily life, a number of findings point to possible impairments in speech prosody that amusic individuals may compensate for by drawing on linguistic information. Using EEG, we investigated (1) whether the processing of speech prosody is impaired in amusia and (2) whether emotional linguistic information can compensate for this impairment.

Method

Twenty Chinese amusics and 22 matched controls were presented pairs of emotional words spoken with either statement or question intonation while their EEG was recorded. Their task was to judge whether the intonations were the same.

Results

Amusics exhibited impair

SUBMITTER: Lu X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4391227 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature