HUSH Prosody

PI Name: Jennifer Vannest Jennifer.Vannest@cchmc.org

Areas: Bi-lateral (Right Domain dominant) Inferior Frontal Gyrus and Superior Temporal Gyrus

Program: DirectRT

Durations: 12 min. 44 sec. (two repeated 5 min. 52 sec. scans)

Special Equipment: Headphones, Visual presentation system

Description: A clustered block acquisition mapping the contrast between prosody detection and meaning comprehension. The prosody detection task includes a movie stimulus of a sentence that depending on prosody can be taken as a statement or a question. Following stimulus the subject is visually prompted to decide whether the stimulus was a question (?) or a statement (.) via a button push. Likewise, the meaning comprehension comprises a visual stimulus of the speaker presenting a sentence that either does or does not pertain to a person. The subject is asked to decide whether or not the sentence pertained to a person (body symbol) or non-person (body symbol crossed out) via button push. There are six blocks alternating between prosody and meaning. Each block is 58 sec., preceded by 4 sec. of dummy scans for a total of 352 sec. Each block consists of a 3 sec. instruction period, followed by five, 11 sec. stimulus/question/delay sets. These are comprised of 3.5 sec of video presentation, 7 sec. of decision making (3 - 2sec. TR’s are acquired after 1 sec.) and .5 sec delay. This clustered acquisition approach 6 allows participants to clearly hear the presented movies without interference from gradient noise. The inclusion of comprehension questions allows for additional behavioral data.