title: Cerebral mechanisms for understanding emotional prosody in speech.
abstract: Hemispheric contributions to the processing of emotional speech prosody were investigated by comparing adults with a focal lesion involving the right (n = 9) or left (n = 11) hemisphere and adults without brain damage (n = 12). Participants listened to semantically anomalous utterances in three conditions (discrimination, identification, and rating) which assessed their recognition of five prosodic emotions under the influence of different task- and response-selection demands. Findings revealed that right- and left-hemispheric lesions were associated with impaired comprehension of prosody, although possibly for distinct reasons: right-hemisphere compromise produced a more pervasive insensitivity to emotive features of prosodic stimuli, whereas left-hemisphere damage yielded greater difficulties interpreting prosodic representations as a code embedded with language content.
authors.affiliation: McGill University, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 1266 ave. des Pins ouest, Montréal, Que., Canada H3G 1A8. marc.pell@mcgill.ca
authors.forename: Marc D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Pell
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000368:Aged; D001037:Aphasia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*