The production of linguistic prosody in subjects with aphasia

Abstract

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.

Acute Ischemic Lesions Associated With Impairments in Expression and Recognition of Affective Prosody

“…Linguistic prosody is modulated by both the left hemisphere (LH) and RH (Balan & Gandour, 1999; Baum, Pell, Leonard, & Gordon, 1997; Gandour & Baum, 2001; Heilman, Bowers, Speedie, & Coslett, 1984; Schirmer, Alter, Kotz, & Friederici, 2001; Walker, Joseph, & Goodman, 2009; Walker, Pelletier, & Reif, 2004). However, LH damage is unique from RH damage in part because it can cause particular difficulty modulating temporal parameters and inconsistent difficulty modulating frequency related parameters (Shah, Baum, & Dwivedi, 2006; Wong, 2002).…”

The importance of situated language use for aphasia rehabilitation

“…Different approaches have been used in the literature to attempt to find an answer. Walker et al (2009) showed that PWA produced prosodic structures that were different from those produced by controls on a word and sentence production task. Crucially, the identification of the intended meaning in those utterances by naïve listeners was more difficult on the items produced by PWA compared to those produced by controls.…”

Lexical stress contrast marking in fluent and non-fluent aphasia in Spanish: The relationship between acoustic cues and compensatory strategies

“…Patients with non-fluent aphasia and concomitant apraxia of speech are thought to suffer from speech motor planning impairments and have often been associated with, among other symptoms, stress contrastiveness reduction (also known as 'equal stress') in the absence of stress assignment deficit (Kent & Rosenbek, 1983;Gandour & Dardarananda, 1984;Ouellette & Baum, 1994;Ogar, Slama, Dronkers, Amici, & Gorno-Tempini, 2005;McNeil, Robin, & Schmidt, 2009;Walker, Joseph, & Goodman, 2009;Duffy, 2013;Vergis et al, 2014). The effect of a word's metrical structure and stress pattern on segmental errors in apraxia of speech (AOS) has also been reported (Ziegler, Thelen, Staiger, & Liepold, 2008;Aichert, Büchner, & Ziegler, 2011).…”

“…Concerning the acoustic characteristics of stress production by aphasic patients in several languages, there has generally been found to be a deficit in durational cue processing (Emmorey, 1987;Gandour, Petty, & Dardarananda, 1989;Ouellette & Baum, 1994;Marquardt, Duffy, & Cannito, 1995;Vergis et al, 2014;but see ;Walker et al, 2009;Ross, Shayya, & Rousseau, 2013 for different results) in non-fluent aphasia and apraxia of speech, often interpreted as a secondary consequence of a basic timing deficit (Danly & Shapiro, 1982). By contrast, other acoustic stress correlates remain relatively unimpaired.…”