title: The music of language: an ERP investigation of the effects of musical training on emotional prosody processing.
abstract: Recent studies have demonstrated the positive effects of musical training on the perception of vocally expressed emotion. This study investigated the effects of musical training on event-related potential (ERP) correlates of emotional prosody processing. Fourteen musicians and fourteen control subjects listened to 228 sentences with neutral semantic content, differing in prosody (one third with neutral, one third with happy and one third with angry intonation), with intelligible semantic content (semantic content condition--SCC) and unintelligible semantic content (pure prosody condition--PPC). Reduced P50 amplitude was found in musicians. A difference between SCC and PPC conditions was found in P50 and N100 amplitude in non-musicians only, and in P200 amplitude in musicians only. Furthermore, musicians were more accurate in recognizing angry prosody in PPC sentences. These findings suggest that auditory expertise characterizing extensive musical training may impact different stages of vocal emotional processing.
authors.affiliation: Neuropsychophysiology Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal; Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. Electronic address: ana.pinheiro@psi.uminho.pt.
authors.forename: Ana P
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Pinheiro
authors.affiliation: Neuropsychophysiology Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
authors.forename: Margarida
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vasconcelos
authors.affiliation: Neuropsychophysiology Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
authors.forename: Marcelo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dias
authors.affiliation: Music Department, Institute of Arts and Human Sciences, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
authors.forename: Nuno
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Arrais
authors.affiliation: Neuropsychophysiology Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal; Spaulding Center of Neuromodulation, Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Óscar F
authors.initials: ÓF
authors.lastname: Gonçalves
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009146:Music / Q000523:psychology*; D012660:Semantics; D013060:Speech; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Emotional prosody; Event-related potentials; Language; Musical training