Lateralization of prosody during language production: A lesion study

To examine brain lateralization of prosody during speech, the sentence prod uction of six right-hemisphere-lesion patients and five left-hemisphere-les ion patients was compared to that of seven normal controls using a question -answer paradigm. The task required the prosodic realization of two differe nt syntactic structures under conditions of wide and narrow focus. Acoustic al analyses were carried out on F0 and time structure. These analyses revea led a preserved ability in patients to express differences in syntactic str ucture via prosody. However, there were deficits in distinguishing narrow f ocus from wide focus. Whereas both right- and left-hemisphere lesions cause d impairments in the realization of F0, time structure was mainly impaired in left-hemisphere patients. Therefore, the present results from language p roduction support functional as well as cue-dependent hypotheses of the lat eralization of prosodic processing in the brain. (C) 2001 Academic Press.