The production of linguistic prosody in subjects with aphasia

This study investigated the production of linguistic prosody in subjects with left hemisphere damage (LHD). Three experiments involving the production of lexical stress in nouns vs verbs, compound nouns vs tag constructions, and echo questions vs statements were conducted. Acoustic measurements (fundamental frequency (F(0)), duration and amplitude) of the prosodic structures were examined and naive listeners were asked to identify the meanings of the utterances. The results of the acoustic measurements indicated that LHD subjects did not produce prosodic structures that were comparable to control subjects to convey different linguistic meanings in all three experiments. Naive listeners had greater difficulty identifying the intended meanings of the utterances produced by the LHD subjects than control subjects in all three experiments. The results suggest that the left hemisphere plays a role in the production of linguistic prosody.