Türkçe Konuşma Dilinde Duygusal Prozodi Ve Sözel Birleşenlerin İncelenmesine Yönelik Nörodilbilimsel Bir İnceleme

Abstract

Emotional prosody which is one of the communicative elements of prosody and transfering emotions to spoken language, has a key role implication of timbre component, mood sense, and prosodic content. For this reason, it serves a highly important functions for sense, the meaning to be reflected, and ability to provide effective coomunication. Due to its crucial role in verbal communication, it has a critical relationship within many disciplines such as linguistics, medicine, computer sciences, etc. Thus the knowledge of how the prosody sequence works in the brain will contribute to both language development and foreign language teaching as well as clinical evaluation of individuals with verbal communication difficulty. From this point of view, the current study takes an interdisciplinear perspective to address the investigation of brain localization of emotional prosody and verbal compenents of spoken Turkish. In accordance with this purpose, the fNIRS technique was used. fNIRS has recently become popular as an emerging optical imaging technique for studying human brain function. However, it is still not widespread compared to other neuroimaging techniques. This study was conducted on both 20 healthy native speakers of Turkish and English. Emotional prosody production and auditory stimulus tasks were performed to determine the brain localization of emotional prosody and verbal components of the Turkish spoken language. Participants were recorded by using fNIRS while performing emotional prosody production and auditory stimulus tasks to measure the brain activation. Our resuIts showed superior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, which includes primary and secondary auditory cortex, and superior temporal cortex, which comprises of temporal sulcus, were strongly activated by prosodies irrespective of emotional valence. Our findings also demonstrated left inferior frontal gyrus which comprises of pars triangularis; (Broadmann Area 45) and the frontal eye field (Broadmann Area 8) were significantly activated for happy, angry, and fearful prosodies in spoken Turkish. This study, which takes a leading part both in terms of methodology and neurolinguistics in Turkish literature, reveals that the emotional prosody of spoken Turkish is totally related to the language system and it is processed bileterally in the cerebral hemispheres.