Neural response to vocal emotional intensity in youth.

Previous research has identified regions of the brain that are sensitive to emotional intensity in faces, with some evidence for developmental differences in this pattern of response. However, comparable understanding of how the brain tracks linear variations in emotional prosody is limited-especially in youth samples. The current study used novel stimuli (morphing emotional prosody from neutral to anger/happiness in linear increments) to investigate whether neural response to vocal emotion was parametrically modulated by emotional intensity and whether there were age-related changes in this effect. Participants aged 8-21 years (n = 56, 52% female) completed a vocal emotion recognition task, in which they identified the intended emotion in morphed recordings of vocal prosody, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Parametric analyses of whole-brain response to morphed stimuli found that activation in the bilateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) scaled to emotional intensity in angry (but not happy) voices. Multivariate region-of-interest analyses revealed the same pattern in the right amygdala. Sensitivity to emotional intensity did not vary by participants' age. These findings provide evidence for the linear parameterization of emotional intensity in angry vocal prosody within the bilateral STG and right amygdala. Although findings should be replicated, the current results also suggest that this pattern of neural sensitivity may not be subject to strong developmental influences.

Investigating Cerebello-Frontal Circuits Associated with Emotional Prosody: A Double-Blind tDCS and fNIRS study.

The emotional and cognitive cerebellum has been explored by several studies in the past years. Recent evidence suggested the possible contribution of the cerebellum in processing emotional prosody, namely the ability to comprehend the emotional content of a given vocal utterance, likely mediated by anatomical and functional cerebello-prefrontal connections. In the present study, the involvement of a functional cerebello-prefrontal network in recognising emotional prosody was assessed by combining non-invasive anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right or the left cerebellum and functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy of the prefrontal cortex, in a double-blind within-subject experimental design on healthy participants. The results showed that right and, to a less extent, left cerebellar tDCS (as compared to sham stimulation) reduced neural activation in the prefrontal cortex while accuracy and reaction times at the vocal recognition task remained unchanged. These findings highlight functional properties of the cerebello-frontal connections and the psychophysiological effects of cerebellar brain stimulation, with possible clinical applications in psychiatric and neurological conditions.

Semantic effects on the perception of emotional prosody in native and non-native Chinese speakers.

While previous research has found an in-group advantage (IGA) favouring native speakers in emotional prosody perception over non-native speakers, the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception remain unclear. This study investigated the effects of semantics on emotional prosody perception in Chinese words and sentences for native and non-native Chinese speakers. The critical manipulation was the congruence of prosodic (positive, negative) and semantic (positive, negative, and neutral) valence. Participants listened to a series of audio clips and judged whether the emotional prosody was positive or negative for each utterance. The results revealed an IGA effect: native speakers perceived emotional prosody more accurately and quickly than non-native speakers in Chinese words and sentences. Furthermore, a semantic congruence effect was observed in Chinese words, where both native and non-native speakers recognised emotional prosody more accurately in the semantic-prosody congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. However, in Chinese sentences, this congruence effect was only present for non-native speakers. Additionally, the IGA effect and semantic congruence effect on emotional prosody perception were influenced by prosody valence. These findings illuminate the role of semantics in emotional prosody perception, highlighting perceptual differences between native and non-native Chinese speakers.

Assessing the perception of emotional prosody in healthy ageing.

BACKGROUND: Emotional prosody is the reflection of emotion types such as happiness, sadness, fear and anger in the speaker's tone of voice. Accurately perceiving, interpreting and expressing emotional prosody is an inseparable part of successful communication and social interaction. There are few studies on emotional prosody, which is crucial for communication, and the results of these studies have inconsistent information regarding age and gender. AIMS: The primary aim of this study is to assess the perception of emotional prosody in healthy ageing. The other aim is to examine the effects of variables such as age, gender, language and neurocognitive capacity on the prediction of emotional prosody recognition skills. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Sixty-nine participants between the ages of 18-75 were included in the study. Participants were grouped as the young group aged 18-35 (n = 26), the middle-aged group aged 36-55 (n = 24) and the elderly group aged 56-75 (n = 19). Perceptual emotional prosody test, motor response time test, and neuropsychological test batteries were administered to the participants. Participants were asked to recognise the emotion in the sentences played on the computer. Natural (neutral, containing neither positive nor negative emotion), happy, angry, surprised and panic emotions were evaluated with sentences composed of pseudoword stimuli. RESULTS AND OUTCOMES: It was observed that the elderly group performed worse in recognising angry, panic, natural and happy emotions and in total recognition, which gives the correct recognition performance in recognition of all emotions. There was no age-related difference in recognition of the emotion of surprise. The women were more successful in recognising angry, panic, happy and total emotions compared to men. Age and Motor Reaction Time Test scores were found to be significant predictors in the emotional response time regression model. Age, language, attention and gender variables were found to have a significant effect on the regression model created for the success of total recognition of emotions (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: This was a novel study in which emotional prosody was assessed in the elderly by eliminating lexical-semantic cues related to emotional prosody and associating emotional prosody results with neuropsychiatric tests. All our findings revealed the importance of age for the perception of emotional prosody. In addition, the effects of cognitive functions such as attention, which decline with age, were found to be important. Therefore, it should not be forgotten that many factors contribute to the success of recognising emotional prosody correctly. In this context, clinicians should consider variables such as cognitive health and education when assessing the perception of emotional prosody in elderly individuals. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject Most of the studies compare young and old groups, and these studies evaluate the perception of emotional prosody by using sentences formed by observing the speech sounds, syllables, words and grammar rules in the vocabulary of the language. It has been reported that the perception of emotional prosody is lower, mostly in the elderly group, but there is inconsistent information in terms of age and gender. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Perceptual Prosody Recognition was evaluated with an experimental design in which sentence structures consisting of lexemes were used as stimuli and neurocognitive tests were included, taking into account the phonological and syntactic rules of language. This study was a novel study in diagnosing emotional prosody in terms of comparing different age groups and determining the factors affecting multidimensional emotional prosody, including neuropsychiatric features. What are the clinical implications of this work? All our findings revealed the importance of age for the perception of emotional prosody. In addition, it was determined that the effects of cognitive functions such as attention were important with age.

Recognition of Emotional Prosody in Mandarin-Speaking Children: Effects of Age, Noise, and Working Memory.

Age, babble noise, and working memory have been found to affect the recognition of emotional prosody based on non-tonal languages, yet little is known about how exactly they influence tone-language-speaking children's recognition of emotional prosody. In virtue of the tectonic theory of Stroop effects and the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model, this study aimed to explore the effects of age, babble noise, and working memory on Mandarin-speaking children's understanding of emotional prosody. Sixty Mandarin-speaking children aged three to eight years and 20 Mandarin-speaking adults participated in this study. They were asked to recognize the happy or sad prosody of short sentences with different semantics (negative, neutral, or positive) produced by a male speaker. The results revealed that the prosody-semantics congruity played a bigger role in children than in adults for accurate recognition of emotional prosody in quiet, but a less important role in children compared with adults in noise. Furthermore, concerning the recognition accuracy of emotional prosody, the effect of working memory on children was trivial despite the listening conditions. But for adults, it was very prominent in babble noise. The findings partially supported the tectonic theory of Stroop effects which highlights the perceptual enhancement generated by cross-channel congruity, and the ELU model which underlines the importance of working memory in speech processing in noise. These results suggested that the development of emotional prosody recognition is a complex process influenced by the interplay among age, background noise, and working memory.

The Company Prosodic Deficits Keep Following Right Hemisphere Stroke: A Systematic Review.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this systematic review was to identify the presence and nature of relationships between specific forms of aprosodia (i.e., expressive and receptive emotional and linguistic prosodic deficits) and other cognitive-communication deficits and disorders in individuals with right hemisphere damage (RHD) due to stroke. METHODS: One hundred and ninety articles from 1970 to February 2020 investigating receptive and expressive prosody in patients with relatively focal right hemisphere brain damage were identified via database searches. RESULTS: Fourteen articles were identified that met inclusion criteria, passed quality reviews, and included sufficient information about prosody and potential co-occurring deficits. Twelve articles investigated receptive emotional aprosodia, and two articles investigated receptive linguistic aprosodia. Across the included studies, receptive emotional prosody was not systematically associated with hemispatial neglect, but did co-occur with deficits in emotional facial recognition, interpersonal interactions, or emotional semantics. Receptive linguistic processing was reported to co-occur with amusia and hemispatial neglect. No studies were found that investigated the co-occurrence of expressive emotional or linguistic prosodic deficits with other cognitive-communication impairments. CONCLUSIONS: This systematic review revealed significant gaps in the research literature regarding the co-occurrence of common right hemisphere disorders with prosodic deficits. More rigorous empirical inquiry is required to identify specific patient profiles based on clusters of deficits associated with right hemisphere stroke. Future research may determine whether the co-occurrences identified are due to shared cognitive-linguistic processes, and may inform the development of evidence-based assessment and treatment recommendations for individuals with cognitive-communication deficits subsequent to RHD.

Principles of Brain and Emotion: Beyond the Cortico-Centric Bias.

Affective neurosciences have largely contributed to the elaboration of theoretical and neuroanatomical models through research conducted in non-primate animals and human beings. However, for methodological and historical reasons, knowledge has developed by focusing mainly on the cerebral cortex, resulting in a lack of investigations of the functional aspects of subcortical structures such as the cerebellum and the basal ganglia. The close anatomical connections revealed between these two structures, as well as their reciprocal connections with the cerebral cortex, lead to a vertically organized model of the brain. Both the cerebellum and the basal ganglia are involved in the different components required during an emotional episode. Their respective specificity in the analysis of temporal patterns contributes to the optimal processing of emotional signals such as those that can be conveyed by the voice (emotional prosody). Internal temporally structured event representation, built from the salient modulation extractions performed by the cerebellum, is used by the basal ganglia to recruit and synchronize the activity of the cortical and subcortical structures required for the relevant processes.

Reward-Based Learning and Emotional Habit Formation in the Cerebellum.

There is growing evidence of the cerebellum's contribution to emotion processing from neuroimaging studies of healthy function and clinical studies of cerebellar patients. As demonstrated initially in the motor domain, one of the cerebellum's functions is to construct internal models of an individual's state and make predictions about how future behaviors will impact that state. By utilizing widespread connections with neocortex and subcortical regions such as the basal ganglia, the cerebellum can monitor and modulate precisely timed patterns of events using prediction and reward-based error feedback in a diverse range of tasks including auditory emotion prosody recognition. In coordination with a broader affective network, the cerebellum helps to select and refine emotional responses that are the most rewarded in a particular context, strengthening neural activity in relevant regions to form a representational chunk. This chunked set of affective stimuli, cognitive evaluations, and physiological responses subsequently can be enacted as a unitary response (i.e., an emotional habit) more quickly and with less attentional control than for a novel stimulus or goal-oriented action. Such emotional habits can allow for efficient, automatic, stimulus-triggered responses while maintaining the flexibility to adapt output when prediction errors signal a renewed need for cerebellar modification of cortical activity, or, conversely, may lead to behavioral or mood disorders when habitual responses persist despite negative consequences.

The role of the dorsal striatum in the recognition of emotions expressed by voice in Parkinson's disease.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Non-motor impairment such as emotion recognition deficit in both facial and vocal expressions has been previously reported in Parkinson's disease (PD). We investigated whether the decoding of emotional prosody is impaired in PD and whether this deficit is related to striatal damage. METHODS: Fifteen PD patients and 15 healthy controls (HCs) were requested to listen to six audio tracks and to recognize the emotions expressed by a professional actor while reading a meaning-neutral sentence. All subjects also received a structural MRI examination. Volumetric measurements were extracted for the striatum, a key region involved in emotional processing and typically impaired in PD. RESULTS: Decoding sadness conveyed by voice was impaired in PD compared with HC and was related to the volume of the dorsal striatum bilaterally. CONCLUSIONS: The dorsal striatum is involved in the decoding of vocal negative emotions in PD.

Vasopressin and parental expressed emotion in the transition to fatherhood.

In the last decades, parenting researchers increasingly focused on the role of fathers in child development. However, it is still largely unknown which factors contribute to fathers' beliefs about their child, which may be crucial in the transition to fatherhood. In the current randomized within-subject experiment, the effect of nasal administration of vasopressin (AVP) on both Five Minute Speech Sample-based (FMSS) expressed emotion and emotional content or prosody was explored in 25 prospectivefathers. Moreover, we explored how the transition to fatherhood affected these FMSS-based parameters, using prenatal and early postnatal measurements. Analyses revealed that FMSS-based expressed emotion and emotional content were correlated, but not affected by prenatal AVP administration. However,child's birth was associated with an increase in positivity and a decrease in emotional prosody, suggesting that the child's birth is more influential with regard to paternal thoughts and feelings than prenatal AVP administration.

Subthalamic nucleus oscillations during vocal emotion processing are dependent of the motor asymmetry of Parkinson's disease.

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) is involved in different aspects of emotional processes and more specifically in emotional prosody recognition. Recent studies on the behavioral effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have uncovered an asymmetry in vocal emotion decoding in PD, with left-onset PD patients showing deficits for the processing of happy voices. Whether and how PD asymmetry affects STN electrophysiological responses to emotional prosody, however, remains unknown. In the current study, local field potential activity was recorded from eight left- and six right-lateralized motor-onset PD patients (LOPD/ROPD) undergoing DBS electrodes implantation, while they listened to angry, happy and neutral voices. Time-frequency decomposition revealed that theta (2-6 Hz), alpha (6-12 Hz) and gamma (60-150 Hz) band responses to emotion were mostly bilateral with a differential pattern of response according to patient's sides-of onset. Conversely, beta-band (12-20 Hz and 20-30 Hz) emotional responses were mostly lateralized in the left STN for both patient groups. Furthermore, STN theta, alpha and gamma band responses to happiness were either absent (theta band) or reduced (alpha and gamma band) in the most affected STN hemisphere (contralateral to the side-of onset), while a late low-beta band left STN happiness-specific response was present in ROPD patients and did not occur in LOPD patients. Altogether, in this study, we demonstrate a complex pattern of oscillatory activity in the human STN in response to emotional voices and reveal a crucial influence of disease laterality on STN low-frequency oscillatory activity.

Age-related differences in neural activation and functional connectivity during the processing of vocal prosody in adolescence.

The ability to recognize others' emotions based on vocal emotional prosody follows a protracted developmental trajectory during adolescence. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms supporting this maturation. The current study investigated age-related differences in neural activation during a vocal emotion recognition (ER) task. Listeners aged 8 to 19 years old completed the vocal ER task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The task of categorizing vocal emotional prosody elicited activation primarily in temporal and frontal areas. Age was associated with a) greater activation in regions in the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyri, b) greater functional connectivity between the left precentral and inferior frontal gyri and regions in the bilateral insula and temporo-parietal junction, and c) greater fractional anisotropy in the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which connects frontal areas to posterior temporo-parietal regions. Many of these age-related differences in brain activation and connectivity were associated with better performance on the ER task. Increased activation in, and connectivity between, areas typically involved in language processing and social cognition may facilitate the development of vocal ER skills in adolescence.

Emotional Communication in Long-Term Abstained Alcoholics.

BACKGROUND: Alcoholism is associated with difficulties in perceiving emotions through nonverbal channels including prosody. The question whether these difficulties persist to long-term abstinence has, however, received little attention. METHODS: In a 2-part investigation, emotional prosody production was investigated in long-term abstained alcoholics and age- and education-matched healthy controls. First, participants were asked to produce semantically neutral sentences in different emotional tones of voice. Samples were then acoustically analyzed. Next, naïve listeners were asked to recognize the emotional intention of speakers from a randomly collected subset. Voice quality indicators were also assessed by the listeners. RESULTS: Findings revealed emotional prosody production differences between the 2 groups. Differences were particularly apparent when looking at pitch use. Alcoholics' mean and variability of pitch differed significantly from controls' use. The use of loudness was affected to a lesser extent. Crucially, naïve raters confirmed that the intended emotion was more difficult to recognize from exemplars produced by alcoholics. Differences between the 2 groups were also found with regard to voice quality. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that emotional communication difficulties can persist long after alcoholics have quit drinking.

Humans recognize emotional arousal in vocalizations across all classes of terrestrial vertebrates: evidence for acoustic universals.

Writing over a century ago, Darwin hypothesized that vocal expression of emotion dates back to our earliest terrestrial ancestors. If this hypothesis is true, we should expect to find cross-species acoustic universals in emotional vocalizations. Studies suggest that acoustic attributes of aroused vocalizations are shared across many mammalian species, and that humans can use these attributes to infer emotional content. But do these acoustic attributes extend to non-mammalian vertebrates? In this study, we asked human participants to judge the emotional content of vocalizations of nine vertebrate species representing three different biological classes-Amphibia, Reptilia (non-aves and aves) and Mammalia. We found that humans are able to identify higher levels of arousal in vocalizations across all species. This result was consistent across different language groups (English, German and Mandarin native speakers), suggesting that this ability is biologically rooted in humans. Our findings indicate that humans use multiple acoustic parameters to infer relative arousal in vocalizations for each species, but mainly rely on fundamental frequency and spectral centre of gravity to identify higher arousal vocalizations across species. These results suggest that fundamental mechanisms of vocal emotional expression are shared among vertebrates and could represent a homologous signalling system.

Vocal emotion processing deficits in HIV-infected individuals.

We aimed to explore the brain imaging correlates of vocal emotion processing in a group of HIV+ individuals and to compare the vocal emotion processing of HIV+ individuals with a group of healthy adults. We conducted multiple linear regressions to determine the cerebral correlates of a newly designed vocal emotion processing test in a sub-group of HIV+ individuals who completed the cerebral magnetic resonance scan (n = 36). Separately, we test whether the association between our test scores and each cerebral measure persisted regardless of the presence of neurocognitive impairment. We also calculated differences in average test scores between the total HIV+ group (n = 100) and a healthy adult group (n = 46). We found a positive association between the test scores and several brain area volumes: right frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, bilateral thalamus, and left hippocampus. We found a negative association between inflammatory markers in frontal white matter and the test scores. After controlling by neurocognitive impairment, several brain area volumes remained positively associated to the prosody test scores. Moreover, the whole HIV+ sample had significantly poorer test scores than healthy adults, but only in the subset of HIV+ individuals with neurocognitive impairment. For the first time, our results suggest that cerebral dysfunctions in particular brain areas involved in the processing of emotional auditory stimuli may occur in HIV+ individuals. These results highlight the need for broad characterization of the neuropsychological consequence of HIV brain damages.

Selective attention to emotional prosody in social anxiety: a dichotic listening study.

The majority of evidence on social anxiety (SA)-linked attentional biases to threat comes from research using facial expressions. Emotions are, however, communicated through other channels, such as voice. Despite its importance in the interpretation of social cues, emotional prosody processing in SA has been barely explored. This study investigated whether SA is associated with enhanced processing of task-irrelevant angry prosody. Fifty-three participants with high and low SA performed a dichotic listening task in which pairs of male/female voices were presented, one to each ear, with either the same or different prosody (neutral or angry). Participants were instructed to focus on either the left or right ear and to identify the speaker's gender in the attended side. Our main results show that, once attended, task-irrelevant angry prosody elicits greater interference than does neutral prosody. Surprisingly, high socially anxious participants were less prone to distraction from attended-angry (compared to attended-neutral) prosody than were low socially anxious individuals. These findings emphasise the importance of examining SA-related biases across modalities.

Emotional prosody expression in acoustic analysis in patients with right hemisphere ischemic stroke.

OBJECTIVES: The role of the right cerebral hemisphere in nonverbal speech activities remains controversial. Most research supports the dominant role of the right hemisphere in the control of emotional prosody. There has been significant discussion of the participation of cortical and subcortical structures of the right hemisphere in the processing of various acoustic speech parameters. The aim of this study was an acoustic analysis of the speech parameters during emotional expression in right hemisphere ischemic strokes with an attempt to reference the results to lesion location. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Acoustic speech analysis was conducted on forty-six right-handed patients with right-middle cerebral artery stroke, together with 34 age-matched people in the control group. We compared the results of acoustic studies between patients with varying infarct locations and the control group. RESULTS: Variations in fundamental frequency during verbal expression of joy, anger and sadness were significantly smaller in the patient group than in the control group. Cortical lesion caused more restrictions in fundamental frequency variation in the expression of joy and a lower voice intensity in expressions of anger and joy compared to those patients with subcortical lesions. CONCLUSIONS: Cortical lesion was associated with a more impaired expression of emotional prosody than subcortical lesion. The results indicate the leading role of the cortical structures of the right hemisphere in the expression of emotional prosody.

[Emotional and language prosody and working memory in patients with depression]. / Prozodia emocjonalna i jezykowa a pamiec operacyjna u chorych z depresja.

AIM: The aim of the study was to verify the hypothesis about the relationship between the efficiency of executive functions and emotional prosody and linguistic prosody among patients with recurrent depressive disorder (rDD). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The study comprised 80 subjects, patients with rDD. Assessment of cognitive function was based on performance of the Trail Making Test (TMT), the Stroop Test, the Verbal Fluency Test (VFT), the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT), Ruff Figural Fluency Test (RFFT) and emotional prosody and linguistic prosody. RESULTS: Efficiency of emotional prosody is linked to the execution of one part of the test VFT. Efficiency in the language prosody goes hand in hand with the speed of execution of both parts of the TMT, correctness of the implementation of VFT and RFFT. A negative impact of depressive symptoms only for language prosody was observed. CONCLUSIONS: Deficits in the recognition of emotional stimuli in depression are not necessarily limited to visual information, but may also apply to non-verbal auditory stimuli (prosody). The severity of symptoms of depression impairs efficiency of linguistic prosody. The efficiency of frontal functions (both visual-spatial and verbal-auditory) is related to the ability of patients to use non-verbal communication of emotional information.

Temporal lobe epilepsy and emotion recognition without amygdala: a case study of Urbach-Wiethe disease and review of the literature.

We describe the epilepsy features and emotion recognition abilities (recognition of basic facial emotions and recognition of emotional prosody) in a patient with Urbach-Wiethe disease with bilateral amygdala calcifications. Our data, supported by ictal video-EEG recording, indicated that our patient suffered from mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. Emotion recognition abilities were compared to those of healthy controls and those of patients with bilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. Our patient showed a selective impairment of the recognition of facial expression of fear, whereas recognition of emotional prosody was preserved, in contrast to bilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients that presented with deficits in both domains. We also reviewed the literature on epilepsy in Urbach-Wiethe disease (41 patients). Our findings suggest that in Urbach-Wiethe disease, the circumscribed damage of both amygdalae results in a selective dysfunction of fearful face processing, in contrast to bilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients who present with a widespread and multimodal impairment in the judgement of emotional stimuli.

Changes in speech prosody perception during Parkinson's disease: A comprehensive analysis.

INTRODUCTION: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects approximately 1%-2% of individuals aged 60 and above. Communication disorders in PD can significantly impact the overall quality of life. As prosody plays a vital role in verbal communication, the present study examines Persian prosody perception in PD, focusing on linguistic and emotional aspects of prosody. METHODS: This cross-sectional study aimed to compare the perception of linguistic and emotional prosody in three groups: middle-aged adults (n = 22; mean age = 50.40 years), healthy older adults (n = 22; mean age = 68.31 years), and individuals with Parkinson's disease (n = 22; mean age = 65years). All individuals with PD were classified in stages 1; 1.5; 2; 2.5, and 3 of the disease using the Hoehn and Yahr scale. All participants had an MMSE score of 24 or above. The Florida Affect Battery (FAB) was used to evaluate prosody perception. This Battery was validated in the Persian language and its reliability and validity were reported as 94 % and 100 % respectively. RESULTS: Participants with PD presented significantly lower scores than the older adults in all subtests of the FAB (p < 0.05), while healthy older adults were significantly different only in linguistic discrimination (ß = -2.14; -3.68 to -0.61), and linguistic naming of prosody (ß = 1.25; 0.17 to 2.33) compared to middle-aged adults. CONCLUSIONS: The present study sheds light on the influence of PD on Persian prosody perception. Given the crucial role of prosody in verbal communication, these findings enhance our understanding of communication disorders in PD and could bring attention to consider prosody perception, among other aspects, when assessing individuals affected by PD.