Hemispheric Processing of Prosody

Abstract

Recent psycholinguistic studies of sentence comprehension support the view that listeners can successfully use prosodic cues to disambiguate ambiguous sentences (Cutler et al., 1997). Prosodic cues such as intonation, pauses at phrase boundary, and increased word durations of phrase reportedly facilitate disambiguation of sentences with surface structure ambiguity (Lehiste, 1973; Lehiste et al., 1976). These multiple prosodic cues of sentences are said to be perceived together to facilitate sentence structure identification (Beach, 1991). Lesion studies have mostly targeted the use of single prosodic elements such as stress, word duration and intonation in language comprehension (Blumstein and Cooper, 1974; Mills and Rollman, 1979). These studies have yielded contradictory results regarding the role of cerebral hemispheres in processing prosody (Baum and Pell, 1999; Joanette et al., 1990). In addition, natural language production and comprehension usually involves use of multiple prosodic cues. Neurolinguistic and neuropsychological studies appear to support the view that processing of complex prosodic cues would tap into the processing potentials of both right and left hemisphere (Wunderlich et al., 2003). Such findings would predict that damage to either hemisphere will interfere with the comprehension of sentences with surface structure ambiguity (SSA). The present study aims at examining the patterns of responses of right hemisphere damaged (RHD), left hemisphere damaged (LHD) and normal controls in comprehending sentences with SSA (e.g., 'The woman told her baby stories'). Although the current study examines lesion data to determine the role of cerebral hemispheres in processing multiple prosodic cues, the role of neural plasticity needs to be recognized in the interpretation of the data (Karbe et al., 1998; Thompson, 2000; Thulborn et al., 1999). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)