Production of affective and linguistic prosody by brain-damaged patients

Abstract

To test a number of hypotheses concerning the functional lateralization of speech prosody, the ability of unilaterally right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD), unilaterally left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD), and age-matched control subjects (NC) to produce linguistic and affective prosodic contrasts at the sentence level was assessed via acoustic analysis. Multiple aspects of suprasegmental processing were explored, including a manipulation of the type of elicitation task employed (repetition vs reading) and the amount of linguistic structure provided in experimental stimuli (stimuli were either speech-filtered, nonsensical, or semantically well formed). In general, the results demonstrated that both RHD and LHD patients were able to appropriately utilize the acoustic parameters examined (duration, fundamental frequency (F 0), amplitude) to differentiate both linguistic and affective sentence types in a manner comparable to NC speakers. Some irregularities in the global modulation of F 0 and amplitude by RHD speakers were noted, however. Overall, the present findings do not provide support for previous claims that the right hemisphere is specifically engaged in the production of affective prosody. Alternative models of prosodic processing are noted.