Communicative And Affective Components in Processing Auditory Vitality Forms: An fMRI Study

In previous studies on auditory vitality forms, we found that listening to action verbs pronounced gently or rudely, produced, relative to a neutral robotic voice, activation of the dorso-central insula. One might wonder whether this insular activation depends on the conjunction of action verbs and auditory vitality forms, or whether auditory vitality forms are sufficient per se to activate the insula. To solve this issue, we presented words not related to actions such as concrete nouns (e.g.,“ball”), pronounced gently or rudely. No activation of the dorso-central insula was found. As a further step, we examined whether interjections, i.e., speech stimuli conveying communicative intention (e.g., “hello”), pronounced with different vitality forms, would be able to activate, relative to control, the insula. The results showed that stimuli conveying a communicative intention, pronounced with different auditory vitality forms activate the dorsal-central insula. These data deepen our understanding of the vitality forms processing, showing that insular activation is not specific to action verbs, but can be also activated by speech acts conveying communicative intention such as interjections. These findings also show the intrinsic social nature of vitality forms because activation of the insula was not observed in the absence of a communicative intention.