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Sensitivity to prosodic structure in left- and right-hemisphere-damaged individuals
Shari R Baum1, Veena D Dwivedi
1McGill University, Montreal, Que., Canada. shari.baum@mcgill.ca
Brain and Language
|October 31, 2003
Summary
Right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients showed no sensitivity to prosody for syntactic disambiguation, while left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) patients responded unexpectedly. This highlights differences in prosodic cue processing between brain-damaged groups.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Prosodic information aids syntactic disambiguation in sentence processing.
- Hemispheric lateralization of language functions, including prosody, is a key area of research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate sensitivity to prosodic cues for syntactic disambiguation in patients with left-hemisphere damage (LHD) and right-hemisphere damage (RHD).
- To compare processing differences between LHD, RHD patients, and neurologically normal controls (NC).
Main Methods:
- A cross-modal lexical decision task was employed.
- Subjects (LHD, RHD, NC) listened to sentences with attachment ambiguities featuring congruent or incongruent prosody.
- A visual lexical decision task was performed concurrently.
Main Results:
- Right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients demonstrated insensitivity to sentence prosody for disambiguation.
- Left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) patients showed a response to prosodic manipulation, but in an unexpected direction.
- Both unilaterally damaged groups differed significantly from each other and from neurologically normal controls (NC).
Conclusions:
- Findings suggest distinct roles of the cerebral hemispheres in processing prosodic cues for syntactic resolution.
- Results challenge existing hypotheses on the hemispheric lateralization of prosodic information processing.
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