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Abstract:
Behavioral studies have reported recognition deficits for emotional prosody in adults with Parkinson’s disease, implying a role for the basal ganglia (BG) in these functions (Breitenstein et al., 2001; Pell & Leonard, 2003). However, previous results do not allow underlying mechanisms substantiating emotional prosody to be separated from process-correlated task effects as reflected in behavioral responses. Therefore, the current study investigated emotional prosody processing in an on-line ERP-experiment using an implicit task. We tested emotional prosody perception in BG-lesion patients using vocal expressions (with and without lexical content) of anger, fear, disgust and happiness compared to a neutral baseline. In addition, the interaction between emotional prosody and emotional semantics was investigated. Using a cross-splicing method, violations of a combined emotional prosodic and emotional semantic contour were created. Results show that early in emotional prosody processing, the different emotions (except for fear) elicit similar differentiation in the ERP in both BG-patients and healthy controls reflected in P200 amplitude differences. However, as demonstrated previously (Paulmann & Kotz, 2005), at later processing stages healthy listeners show a negativity in response to violations of combined emotional prosodic and semantic content irrespective of emotion, whereas BG-patients show this negativity only for the emotions “happiness” and “anger” (but not “fear” or “disgust”). The current data serve as renewed evidence that the emotional perception of disgust and fear is impaired in BG-patients. In particular, the integration between emotional prosody and semantics seems influenced by structural changes of the BG.
