Prosody processing of korean language in stroke patients: a preliminary study.
OBJECTIVE
To investigate the hemispheric contributions to prosody recognitions and interference effects of semantic processing on prosody for stroke patients by using the Korean language.


METHODS
Ten right hemisphere damaged patients (RHD), nine left hemisphere damaged patients (LHD), and eleven healthy controls (HC) participated. In pure prosody recognition task, four semantically neutral sentences were selected and presented in both sad and happy prosodies. In interference task, participants listened to emotionally intoned sentences in which the semantic contents were congruent or incongruent with prosody. Participants were asked to rate the valence of prosody while ignoring the semantic contents, and thus, reaction time and accuracy were estimated.


RESULTS
In pure prosody recognition task, RHD showed low accuracy as compared to HC (p=0.013), and the tendency of group response showed that RHD performed worse than HC and LHD with regards to accuracy and reaction time. In interference task, analysis of accuracy revealed a significant main effect of groups (p=0.04), and the tendency implied that RHD is less accurate as compared to LHD and HC. The RHD took longer reaction times than HC in congruent and incongruent items (p<0.001).


CONCLUSIONS
Right hemispheric laterality to prosody processing of Korean language in stroke patients was observed. Interference effects of semantic contents to prosody processing were not observed, which suggested unique characteristics of prosody for Korean language. These results could be referred as preliminary data for future researches on Korean languages.
Department of Rehabilitation, National Rehabilitation Center, Seoul, Korea.
Hye-In
HI
Ju
Yong-Wook
YW
Shin
Seok-Hee
SH
Han
Jeom-Sook
JS
Kim
Hye-Young
HY
Choi
Hye-Sun
HS
Lee
Thine
T
Yang
Joon-Ho
JH
Shin
Functional laterality; Speech disorders; Speech perception; Stroke