A distinct set of brain areas process prosody–the melody of speech

Human speech carries information beyond the words themselves: pitch, loudness, duration, and pauses–jointly referred to as ‘prosody’–emphasize critical words, help group words into phrases, and convey emotional and other socially-relevant information. Using a novel fMRI paradigm, we identify a set of prosody-responsive brain areas and then richly characterize them across 8 experiments (25 experimental conditions; n=51 participants). These areas–located on the lateral temporal surface bilaterally and in the frontal lobe–respond to the presence of prosody in both meaningful and meaningless speech, and are distinct from nearby temporal pitch- and speech-perception areas and from frontal areas sensitive to general cognitive and attentional demands. They are also dissociable from–but show partial overlap with–the language areas and with the area that processes dynamic facial expressions. Thus, prosodic information is processed by a distinct set of brain areas, which may help integrate linguistic meanings with non-verbal communicative signals.