Redundancy enhances emotional inferencing by right- and left-hemisphere-damaged adults

This study investigated the influence of enhanced textual redundancy on affective interpretations made by unilaterally right or left hemisphere brain-damaged adults and normally aging control subjects. Emotional interferences were drawn from linguistic or prosodic material, and redundancy effects were examined within and across stimulus boundaries. Results indicate that heightened semantic redundancy improved the accuracy of linguistic and prosodic judgements of affect for all groups. Correct prosodic judgements were also made more quickly by a subset of each group when textual redundancy was maximized. The facilitory influence of increased redundancy was not attributable solely to perseveration or response rigidity. Possible mechanisms by which semantic redundancy affects cognitive processing are considered.