More than words: prosody in the brain
The brain's dedicated hardware for handling the melody of speech overlaps with regions involved in language processing and recognizing facial expressions.
It's not what you said, it's how you said it.
Prosody — a catch-all for variations in pitch, volume, tempo, and more that give speech its melody — does quite a lot of work in human communication. Prosody conveys our emotions, which can completely change the meaning of a statement in context. The same words, screamed, stated as a matter-of-fact, or delivered dripping in sarcasm, can mean vastly different things.
But prosody goes far deeper than adding a layer of emotion over the literal meaning of speech. The way we speak, as opposed to what we say, can change the meaning of an utterance entirely. It can tag particular words as new or important, mark the ends of words or phrases, and even transform statements into questions. In English, ascending pitch acts like an auditory question mark superimposed over the last syllable of a sentence. Other languages do things differently: Hungarian turns simple statements of fact into questions with a sharp rise in pitch on the second-to-last syllable, followed by a drop.
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