Research Report Functional contributions of the basal ganglia to emotional prosody: Evidence from ERPs Silke Paulmann a,b, ⁎ , Marc D. Pell b , Sonja A. Kotz a,c a Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, P.O. Box 500 355, 04303 Leipzig, Germany b School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montréal, Canada c Day Care Clinic of Cognitive Neurology, University of Leipzig, Germany ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Accepted 16 April 2008 Available online 24 April 2008 The basal ganglia (BG) have been functionally linked to emotional processing [Pell, M.D., Leonard, C.L., 2003. Processing emotional tone form speech in Parkinson's Disease: a role for the basal ganglia. Cogn. Affec. Behav. Neurosci. 3, 275–288; Pell, M.D., 2006. Cerebral mechanisms for understanding emotional prosody in speech. Brain Lang. 97 (2), 221–234]. However, few studies have tried to specify the precise role of the BG during emotional prosodic processing. Therefore, the current study examined deviance detection in healthy listeners and patients with left focal BG lesions during implicit emotional prosodic processing in an event-related brain potential (ERP)-experiment. In order to compare these ERP responses with explicit judgments of emotional prosody, the same participants were tested in a follow-up recognition task. As previously reported [Kotz, S.A., Paulmann, S., 2007. When emotional prosody and semantics dance cheek to cheek: ERP evidence. Brain Res. 1151, 107–118; Paulmann, S. & Kotz, S.A., 2008. An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in pseudo- and lexical sentence context. Brain Lang. 105, 59–69], deviance of prosodic expectancy elicits a right lateralized positive ERP component in healthy listeners. Here we report a similar positive ERP correlate in BG- patients and healthy controls. In contrast, BG-patients are significantly impaired in explicit recognition of emotional prosody when compared to healthy controls. The current data serve as first evidence that focal lesions in left BG do not necessarily affect implicit emotional prosodic processing but evaluative emotional prosodic processes as demonstrated in the recognition task. The results suggest that the BG may not play a mandatory role in implicit emotional prosodic processing. Rather, executive processes underlying the recognition task may be dysfunctional during emotional prosodic processing. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Basal ganglia Language Emotion Prosody ERPs 1. Introduction Successful emotional communication is crucial to social interaction. The tone of voice, or emotional prosody, helps to understand how people feel. In particular, listeners must con- tinually monitor and rapidly detect changes in their inter- locutor's mood in order to adapt their behavior accordingly during speech perception. Imagine a telephone conversation BRAIN RESEARCH 1217 (2008) 171 – 178 ⁎ Corresponding author. Fax: +49 514 398 8123. E-mail address: Silke.Paulmann@mail.mcgill.ca (S. Paulmann). 0006-8993/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2008.04.032 available at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/brainres