[IN2-2.004] Detecting Sarcasm from Paralinguistic Cues: Anatomic and Cognitive Correlates in Neurodegenerative Disease

Katherine Rankin, Andrea G. Salazar, Maria Gorno Tempini, Danijela Pavlic, Christine M. Stanley, Shenly Glenn, Michael Weiner, Mill Valley, CA, Bruce Miller, San Francisco, CA

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the structural neuroanatomy underlying neurodegenerative disease patients failure to understand sarcasm from dynamic vocal and facial paralinguistic cues. BACKGROUND: While sarcasm can be conveyed solely through contextual cues such as counterfactual or echoic statements, face-to-face sarcastic speech may be characterized by a specific paralinguistic profile that alerts the listener to interpret the utterance as ironic or critical, even in the absence of contextual information. DESIGN/METHODS: Ninety-one subjects (20 frontotemporal dementia, 11 semantic dementia [SemD], 4 progressive nonfluent aphasia, 28 Alzheimers, 6 corticobasal degeneration, 9 progressive supranuclear palsy, 13 healthy older controls) were tested using the Social Inference-Minimal subtest of The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT). Subjects watched brief videos depicting sincere or sarcastic communication and answered yes-no questions about the speakers intended meaning. RESULTS: All groups performed normally interpreting items on a Sincere control task, suggesting other cognitive impairments did not significantly account for Sarcasm task performance. Only the SemD group was impaired on the Simple Sarcasm condition. Subjects failing the sarcasm comprehension task performed more poorly on dynamic emotion recognition tasks, had more neuropsychiatric disturbances, but had better verbal and visuospatial working memory than patients who comprehended sarcasm. Voxel-based morphometry analysis of TASIT scores was performed using age, sex, total intracranial volume, and performance on the Sincere condition as covariates. Poorer sarcasm recognition correlated with right temporal lobe atrophy (anterior fusiform and parahippocampal gyrii, superior temporal sulcus), and atrophy to the right superior frontal gyrus and striatal structures (right caudate and left globus pallidus) (p<0.05, FWE). CONCLUSIONS/RELEVANCE: This study provides lesion data suggesting that the right posterior temporal lobe and dorsomedial frontal cortex are associated with recognizing and interpreting sarcastic irony using paralinguistic vocal and facial cues, consistent with functional imaging research examining neural correlates of voice prosody, facial emotion recognition, and perspective taking. Supported by: NIA-PPG-P01-AG1972403;NIA-K23-1AG21606-01;LLHF2002/2J;ARCC01-154-20;GCRC-M01-RR00079.
Category - Behavioral Neurology
SubCategory - Imaging

Monday, April 14, 2008 5:15 PM

Platform Session: Integrated Neuroscience: New Methods in Imaging (4:30 PM-6:00 PM)

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