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    Preserved appreciation of aesthetic elements of speech and music prosody in an amusic individual: A holistic approach

    Loutrari, Ariadni and Lorch, Marjorie (2017) Preserved appreciation of aesthetic elements of speech and music prosody in an amusic individual: A holistic approach. Brain and Cognition 115 , pp. 1-11. ISSN 0278-2626.

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    Abstract

    We present a follow-up study on the case of a Greek amusic adult, B.Z., whose impaired performance on scale, contour, interval, and meter was reported by Paraskevopoulos, Tsapkini, and Peretz in 2010, employing a culturally-tailored version of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia. In the present study, we administered a novel set of perceptual judgement tasks designed to investigate the ability to appreciate holistic prosodic aspects of ‘expressiveness’ and emotion in phrase length music and speech stimuli. Our results show that, although diagnosed as a congenital amusic, B.Z. scored as well as healthy controls (N = 24) on judging ‘expressiveness’ and emotional prosody in both speech and music stimuli. These findings suggest that the ability to make perceptual judgements about such prosodic qualities may be preserved in individuals who demonstrate difficulties perceiving basic musical features such as melody or rhythm. B.Z.’s case yields new insights into amusia and the processing of speech and music prosody through a holistic approach. The employment of novel stimuli with relatively fewer non-naturalistic manipulations, as developed for this study, may be a useful tool for revealing unexplored aspects of music and speech cognition and offer the possibility to further the investigation of the perception of acoustic streams in more authentic auditory conditions.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Congenital amusia, Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, Speech prosody, Music prosody, Auditory perception, Emotional expression
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 31 Mar 2017 12:25
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:41
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/18515

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