The Ability of Right- and Left-Hemisphere-Damaged Individuals to Produce and Interpret Prosodic Cues Marking Phrasal Boundaries

Two experiments were conducted with the purpose of investigating the ability of right- and left-hemisphere-damaged individuals to produce and perceive the acoustic correlates to phrase boundaries. In the production experiment, the utterance pink and black and green was elicited in three different conditions corresponding to different arrangements of colored squares. Acoustic analyses revealed that both left- and right-hemisphere-damaged patients exhibited fewer of the expected acoustic patterns in their productions than did normal control subjects. The reduction in acoustic cues to phrase boundaries in the utterances of both patient groups was perceptually salient to three trained listeners. The perception experiment demonstrated a significant impairment in the ability of both left-hemisphere-damaged and right-hemisphere-damaged individuals to perceive phrasal groupings. Results are discussed in relation to current hypotheses concerning the cerebral lateralization of speech prosody.