Lateralization of Prosody during Language Production: A Lesion Study

Neural substrates of linguistic prosody: Evidence from syntactic disambiguation in the productions of brain-damaged patients

“…The findings of the present investigation are consistent with those of several recent experiments that have shown relatively normal patterns of acoustic cues to sentence-level prosodic distinctions as produced by both LHD and RHD patients (e.g., Baum et al, 2001;Schirmer et al, 2001;Walker et al, 2004). Despite the relatively preserved patterns, individuals with LHD in particular, displayed less consistent use of temporal parameters in signaling the intonational phrase boundaries (and hence the syntactic distinctions) in the present investigation.…”

“…Again, analyses of the F0 patterns yielded few of the expected cues in any speaker group (see also Albritton et al, 1996). Schirmer et al (2001) have also found largely unimpaired prosody production abilities in both LHD and RHD speakers in a task requiring the shifting of stress across sentence positions to indicate focus. Nonetheless, as in previous studies (e.g., Walker et al, 2004), listeners exhibited greater difficulty in identifying the position of contrastive emphasis in productions of the brain-damaged individuals relative to control subjects.…”

“…For example, looking only at linguistic prosody, numerous investigators have reported impairments in the control of temporal parameters of speech prosody in lefthemisphere-damaged (LHD) individuals (e.g., Baum et al, 2001;Danly & Shapiro, 1982;Danly et al, 1983;Gandour et al, 1993;2000;Schirmer et al, 2001), but relatively spared control of timing in individuals with right hemisphere damage (RHD) (Baum & Boyczuk, 1999;Gandour et al, 1994;Schirmer et al, 2001;Walker et al, 2004). However, investigations of the control of F0 in brain-damaged speakers have yielded mixed results, sometimes demonstrating deficits on the part of LHD speakers (e.g., Cooper et al, 1984;Danly & Shapiro, 1982;Danly et al, 1983;Ryalls, 1982) and sometimes showing deficits for RHD speakers (e.g., Behrens, 1989;Bradvik et al, 1991;Bryan, 1989;Shapiro & Danly, 1985;Weintraub et al, 1981).…”

“…Whereas the majority of studies of the production (and perception; see e.g., Heilman et al, 1984;Pell & Baum, 1997a;Weintraub et al, 1981) of linguistic prosody in brain-damaged patients have concentrated on global acoustic cues to sentence type (i.e., declarative vs. interrogative vs. imperative), there has recently been a surge of interest in more subtle, but extremely important linguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues in both normal speech production (e.g., Beach, 1991;Grabe & Warren, 1995;Nagel et al, 1994;Price et al, 1991), as well as in production by brain-damaged patients (e.g., Grela & Gandour, 1998;Schirmer et al, 2001;Walker et al, 2004; see also Grosjean & Hirt, 1996;Marslen-Wilson et al,.1992;Nagel et al, 1994;Shapiro & Nagel, 1995;Walker et al, 2001;2004 for data on perception). Of particular relevance to the present investigation are a number of investigations that have examined the ability of brain-damaged patients to mark syntactic boundaries using prosodic cues.…”

FMRI reveals brain regions mediating slow prosodic modulations in spoken sentences

“…The results indicate that right hemisphere's involvement in prosody comprehension increased when the linguistic significance of speech was reduced [Perkins et al, 1996]. This finding is also corroborated by a lesion study investigating the lateralization of linguistic prosody in patients with either a left or right temporal lesion during sentence production [Schirmer et al, 2001]. Although LBD patients revealed more difficulties in timing their speech production, the RBD patients were mainly impaired in producing speech melody.…”