THE ABILITY TO PERCEIVE AND COMPREHEND INTONATION IN LINGUISTIC AND AFFECTIVE CONTEXTS BY BRAIN-DAMAGED ADULTS

Receptive tasks of linguistic and affective prosody were administered to 9 right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD), 10 left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD), and 10 age-matched control (NCI subjects. Two tasks measured subjects ' ability to discriminate utterances based solely on prosodic cues, an d six tasks required subjects to identify linguistic or affective into national meanings. Identification tasks manipulated the degree to whic h the auditory stimuli were structured linguistically, presenting spee ch-filtered, nonsensical, and semantically well-formed utterances in d ifferent tasks. Neither patient group was impaired relative to normals in discriminating prosodic patterns or recognizing affective tone con veyed suprasegmentally, suggesting that neither the LHD nor the RHD pa tients displayed a receptive disturbance for emotional prosody. The LH D group, however, was differentially impaired on linguistic rather tha n emotional tasks and performed significantly worse than the NC group on linguistic tasks even when semantic information biased the target r esponse. (C) 1997 Academic Press.