Prosody (intonation and rhythm) plays a crucial role in spoken communication and speech acquisition. The study of motor representations is a crucial step in better understanding the nature of the prosodic currency in speaker/listener interaction. The new cerebral imagery techniques seem likely to contribute fundamental knowledge on the control of prosody by the central nervous system.
Recent works suggest that Broca's Area -- which was traditionally associated to the production of speech in general, and then considered as the locus for syntax as a whole -- should rather be seen as involved in very specific syntactic processings, in both speech production and comprehension. The Supplementary Motor Area (SMA), on the other hand, would play an important role in the control of repetitive speech (speech that does not need syntactic processing) .
The aim of this project is to better delimit the patterns of cerebral activation during simple prosodic tasks, which primarily involve the SMA (such as the control of basic rhythm) or less simple tasks (such as the control of emphasis, then focus) and to detect from which level of prosodico-syntactic processing Broca's area becomes recruited.
In addition to fundamental results on the motor representations of prosody, this project may offer clinical applications in the diagnosis of patients with prosodic disorders.
Researchers involved in the project: