Impaired processing of prosodic and musical patterns after right hemisphere damage

Abstract

The distinction between the processing of musical information and segmental speech information (i.e., consonants and vowels) has been much explored. In contrast, the relationship between the processing of music and prosodic speech information (e.g., intonation) has been largely ignored. We report an assessment of prosodic perception for an amateur musician, KB, who became amusic following a right-hemisphere stroke. Relative to matched controls, KB's segmental speech perception was preserved. However, KB was unable to discriminate pitch or rhythm patterns in linguistic or musical stimuli. He was also impaired on prosodic perception tasks (e.g., discriminating statements from questions). Results are discussed in terms of common neural mechanisms that may underlie the processing of some aspects of both music and speech prosody.

Dissociação entre alterações de linguagem e preservação da musicalidade em uma criança com epilepsia refratária

“…Com tais evidências, acredita-se na funcionalidade de seu hemisfério direito, visto que este atua em certas habilidades artísticas, como a música (7,8,11) . As características referentes à compreensão da linguagem oral evidenciam uma provável disfunção em hemisfé-rio esquerdo, considerado dominante para a linguagem e responsável pela compreensão dos sentidos das palavras (semântica).…”

“…Entretanto, um outro aspecto bastante intrigante e que começa a ser melhor entendido é a organização diferenciada da linguagem que envolve elementos 'musicais', ou seja, o fato de o cérebro organizar de forma distinta as funções clássicas da linguagem e a 'linguagem musical' musicada). Evidências disponíveis até o momento sugerem que a linguagem associada à musicalidade depende, fundamentalmente, de estruturas localizadas no hemisfé-rio não dominante, o que explicaria a preservação destas funções em pacientes com disfasias clássicas decorrentes de lesões no hemisfério dominante (1,6,7,8,11) . No universo da epileptologia, onde as disfunções e eventuais transferências das funções da linguagem assumem papéis muito relevantes, em especial em candidatos à cirurgia da epilepsia, é crucial identificar-se as relações anátomo-funcionais ligadas às alterações de linguagem clássica e de linguagem musicada.…”

Read my lips: speech distortions in musical lyrics can be overcome (slightly) by facial information

“…Also many turn-taking cues that are essential for an effective interaction in a communication are apparent in the visual modality (see Granströ m and House, 2005, for a review). Also prominence can be detected in visual speech rather well (Bernstein et al, 1989;Dohen et al, 2004;Dohen et al, 2005;Granströ m et al, 1999;House et al, 2001;Keating et al, 2003;Lansing and McConkie, 1999;Massaro, 2002;Nicholson et al, 2003;Risberg and Lubker, 1978;Swerts and Krahmer, 2004;Swerts and Krahmer, 2005;Thompson, 1934). Visual speech information contributes to the recognition of lexical tones in Cantonese and Thai (Burnham et al, 2001;Mixdorff et al, 2005) and is informative about lexical stress in English and Swedish (Keating et al, 2003;Risberg and Lubker, 1978).…”

“…Visual speech information contributes to the recognition of lexical tones in Cantonese and Thai (Burnham et al, 2001;Mixdorff et al, 2005) and is informative about lexical stress in English and Swedish (Keating et al, 2003;Risberg and Lubker, 1978). Visual speech information has also been shown to provide information about the intonation contour of an utterance and therefore to aid in the discrimination of statements and echoic questions (Bernstein et al, 1989;Fisher, 1969;Hnath-Chisolm and Kishon-Rabin, 1988;House, 2002;Nicholson et al, 2003;Srinivasan and Massaro, 2003).…”

Pitch Processing in Children with Williams Syndrome: Relationships between Music and Prosody Skills

“…The existence of shared mechanisms between music and prosody processing may be accounted for by the fact that both music and prosody are expressed through variations in pitch, loudness and length (duration), i.e. , through the same parameters (e.g., [9,10,11,12]). Among these parameters, pitch is considered to be especially important for revealing the modularity or possible relationships in music and prosody processing because of its important role for conveying information in both domains [13].…”