The ability to perceive and comprehend intonation in linguistic and affective contexts by brain-damaged adults

Author(s): Baum, S. R.

Journal/Book: Brain Lang. 1997; 57: 525 B St, Ste 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495. Academic Press Inc Jnl-Comp Subscriptions. 80-99.

Abstract: Receptive tasks of linguistic and affective prosody were administered to 9 right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD), 10 left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD), and 10 age-matched control (NCI subjects. Two tasks measured subjects' ability to discriminate utterances based solely on prosodic cues, and six tasks required subjects to identify linguistic or affective intonational meanings. Identification tasks manipulated the degree to which the auditory stimuli were structured linguistically, presenting speech-filtered, nonsensical, and semantically well-formed utterances in different tasks. Neither patient group was impaired relative to normals in discriminating prosodic patterns or recognizing affective tone conveyed suprasegmentally, suggesting that neither the LHD nor the RHD patients displayed a receptive disturbance for emotional prosody. The LHD group, however, was differentially impaired on linguistic rather than emotional tasks and performed significantly worse than the NC group on linguistic tasks even when semantic information biased the target response.

Note: Article Pell MD, Mcgill Univ, Sch Commun Sci & Disorders, 1266 Pine Ave W, Montreal, PQ H3G 1A8, CANADA

Keyword(s): RIGHT-HEMISPHERE; PROSODY; LANGUAGE; SPEECH; DISTURBANCES; PERCEPTION

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