Concerning right-hemisphere dominance for affective language.

Abstract

In a series of stimulating articles that were recently published in theArchives, Ross et al 1-3 have claimed that right hemisphere is dominant for modulating the affective components of language. 3(p745) While it has been a few years since these articles first appeared, the issue is still in focus. As we interpret the data of Ross and colleagues, there is a strong form and a weak form of their hypothesis. The strong form is that the right hemisphere plays a privileged, if not critical, role in the modulation of prosody at the sentence level (intonation, fundamental frequency, or FO) in all speech production. The weaker form of this hypothesis is that the right hemisphere plays a privileged role in imparting emotional-affective modulation of speech, but it is not critical to implementation of normal intonation modulation in nonaffective contexts. The crucial difference between the weak and strong hypotheses