Lateralization of prosody during language production: a lesion study

To examine brain lateralization of prosody during speech, the sentence production of six right-hemisphere-lesion patients and five left-hemisphere-lesion patients was compared to that of seven normal controls using a question-answer paradigm. The task required the prosodic realization of two different syntactic structures under conditions of wide and narrow focus. Acoustical analyses were carried out on F0 and time structure. These analyses revealed a preserved ability in patients to express differences in syntactic structure via prosody. However, there were deficits in distinguishing narrow focus from wide focus. Whereas both right- and left-hemisphere lesions caused impairments in the realization of F0, time structure was mainly impaired in left-hemisphere patients. Therefore, the present results from language production support functional as well as cue-dependent hypotheses of the lateralization of prosodic processing in the brain.