Fascinating work from Thompson et al. (open access), suggesting
that sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from our
capacity to process music, supporting the idea of an
evolutionary link between musical and language domains in the
brain.: A number of evolutionary theories assume that music and
language have a common origin as an emotional protolanguage that
remains evident in overlapping functions and shared neural
circuitry. The most basic prediction of this hypothesis is that
sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from the
capacity to process music. We examined sensitivity to emotion in
speech prosody in a sample of individuals with congenital
amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits
in processing acoustic and structural attributes of music.
Twelve individuals with congenital amusia and 12 matched control
participants judged the emotional expressions of 96 spoken
phrases. Phrases were semantically neutral but prosodic cues
(tone of voice) communicated each of six