Tasks testing linguistic and affective prosody were administered to nine right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD), ten left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD), and ten age-matched control (NC) subjects. Two tasks measured subjects' abilities to make same/different judgments about prosodic patterns which had been filtered of the linguistic content, while six tasks required subjects to identify typical linguistic or affective meanings for intonation contours. The six identification tasks varied in the amount of linguistic structure available to subjects during auditory perception; stimuli were either filtered of their phonetic content, presented as nonsense utterances, or provided appropriate semantic information which biased the prosodic target. Unilateral damage to either cerebral hemisphere did not impair subjects' ability to discriminate prosodic patterns, or to recognize the affective mood conveyed through prosody. Contrary to expectation, RHD patients performed comparably in both propositional and affective contexts, and thus did not show evidence of a specific disturbance of emotional prosody. LHD patients, however, were differentially impaired on linguistic tasks rather than emotional tasks when compared to the NC group, even when semantic information biased the target response. The results are discussed with respect to theories of lateralized processing of linguistic and affective prosody.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.69735 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Pell, Marc D. |
| Contributors | Baum, Shari R. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Human Communication Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001351910, proquestno: AAIMM91851, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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