Deviant prosody in patients with cortical damage

Abstract

The clinical impression is that deviant linguistic prosody, deviant tone, intonation, stress and duration, is primarily found in patients with left hemisphere damage. The paper discusses to what extent acoustic investigations of the speech of patients with cortical damage, and studies of the ability to perceive prosodic distinctions in the same patient groups, support the clinical impression of a left hemisphere superiority in prosodic processing. The paper also addresses the question of hemispheric specialization of emotional prosody, the assumption that emotional prosody is primarily a property of the right hemisphere. Recent studies have found disturbed comprehension and production of emotional prosody as a result of damage to either hemisphere.