Neural substrates of linguistic prosody: Evidence from syntactic disambiguation in the productions of brain-damaged patients

Abstract

The present investigation focussed on the neural substrates underlying linguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues. A production experiment was conducted to examine the ability of left-(LHD) and right-(RHD) hemisphere damaged patients and normal controls to use temporal and fundamental frequency cues to disambiguate sentences which include one or more Intonational Phrase level (IPh) prosodic boundaries.Acoustic analyses of subjects' productions of three sentence-types -parentheticals, appositives, and tags -showed that LHD speakers, compared to RHD and normal controls, exhibited impairments in the control of temporal parameters signalling phrase boundaries, including inconsistent patterns of pre-boundary lengthening and longer-thannormal pause durations in non-boundary positions. Somewhat surprisingly, a perception test presented to a group of normal native listeners showed listeners experienced greatest difficulty in identifying the presence or absence of boundaries in the productions of the RHD speakers. The findings support a cue lateralization hypothesis in which prosodic domain plays an important role.

Use of prosodic cues in the production of idiomatic and literal sentences by individuals with right- and left-hemisphere damage

“…Although sample sizes for the brain-damaged participant groups were small, this finding is consistent with previous production studies investigating the use of prosodic cues to distinguish ambiguities at the sentence level (linguistic versus emotional prosody, or syntactic ambiguities), where results have Production of Prosodic Cues in Idioms 11 shown that both left-and right-hemisphere-damaged participants had fairly normal control over their production of prosodic cues Baum, Pell, Leonard & Gordon, 2001;Shah et al, 2006).…”

“…Finally, Gandour and colleagues (2003) suggest that the LH and RH preferentially process acoustic prosodic parameters over linguistic units of variable lengths, rather than absolute time windows. Thus, the short prosodic domain (LH) may span over a syllable or a word, and the long domain (RH) may span across a phrase or sentence (Gandour et al, 2003;Baum & Dwivedi, 2003;Shah, Baum & Dwivedi, 2006).…”

The production of linguistic prosody in subjects with aphasia

“…No differences emerged regarding F 0 measures between groups. Shah, Baum, and Dwivedi (2006) reported similar findings in a study in which they asked LHD and RHD speakers to produce sentences with parenthetical, appositive, and tag syntactic constructions. Listeners had greater difficulty identifying productions of both RHD and LHD groups than the control group.…”

“…2001;Schirmer et al, 2001;Shah et al, 2006). An additional timing deficit that was observed in our LHD subjects was the insertion of pauses at non-syntactic junctures in compound noun constructions.…”

Disociaciones entre prosodia emocional y lingüística en pacientes con lesiones cerebrales del hemisferio derecho

“…El hallazgo de una disociación doble entre la capacidad de repetir prosodia emocional y lingüística apoya el supuesto de independencia funcional entre la repetición de ambas clases de prosodia ya que la alteración de un tipo de ellas no implica necesariamente la alteración en la otra y viceversa. En trabajos anteriores se reportó que los pacientes con lesiones de HD pueden presentar alteraciones tanto para producir prosodia emocional (Cohen et al, 1994;Guranski & Podemski, 2015;Heilman et al, 2004;Wright et al, 2016) como lingüística (Ross, Shayya, & Rousseau, 2013;Shah, Baum, & Dwivedi, 2006). Por su parte, los resultados del presente trabajo permiten establecer, además, que esas alteraciones pueden mostrar una doble disociación que aportan evidencia a favor del postulado de independencia funcional entre ambos tipos de prosodia a nivel de la capacidad de producción.…”