Gender
Differences in Emotional Prosody Processing \ A fMRI Study\
S. Imaizumi, M. Homma, Y. Ozawa, M. Maruishi, & H. Muranaka |
To
clarify how the brain understands the speaker's mind for verbal acts,
we analyzed fMRI images obtained from 24 subjects when they judged
linguistic meanings or emotional manners of spoken phrases. The target
phrases had linguistically positive or negative meanings and were
uttered warmheartedly or coldheartedly by a woman speaker. Significant
interaction effects of meaning and manner were observed on the acoustic
characteristics of utterances, such as FO range, and also on the
perceptual behavior evaluated by response time and judgment correctness.
When compared to the female subjects, the male subjects showed significantly
stronger activation only in the right frontomedian cortex, which
can be hypothesized to analyze and understand speaker's hidden but
true intentions from speaking acts. These results suggest that emotion
modulates linguistic processes not only in speech production but
also in speech perception, and such modulations differ between the
genders at least in perceptual processes.
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