| Summary: | This study was designed to clarify some of the issues surrounding the nature of hemispheric contributions to the processing of emotional and linguistic prosody, as well as to examine the relative contribution of different sensory modalities in processing prosodic structures. Ten healthy young participants were presented with semantically neutral sentences expressing affective or linguistic prosody solely through the use of non-verbal cues (intonation, facial expressions) while undergoing tMRI. The sentences were presented under auditory, visual, as well as audio-visual conditions. The emotional prosody task required participants to identify the emotion of the utterance (happy or angry) and the linguistic prosody task required participants to identify the type of utterance (question or statement). Core peri-sylvian, frontal and occipital areas were activated bilaterally in all conditions suggesting that processing of affective and linguistic prosodic structures is supported by overlapping networks. The strength of these activations may, in part, be modulated by task and modality of presentation.
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