Sensitivity to prosodic structure in left-and right-hemisphere-damaged individuals

An experiment was conducted in order to determine whether left- (LHD) and right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients exhibit sensitivity to prosodic information that is used in syntactic disambiguation. Following the work of Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Warren, Gremer, and Lee (1992), a cross-modal lexical decision task was performed by LHD and RHD subjects, as well as by adults without brain pathology (NC). Subjects listened to sentences with attachment ambiguities with either congruent or incongruent prosody, while performing a visual lexical decision task. Results showed that each of the unilaterally damaged populations differed from each other, as well as from the NCs in terms of sensitivity regarding prosodic cues. Specifically, the RHD group was insensitive to sentence prosody as a whole. This was in contrast to the LHD patients, who responded to the prosodic manipulation, but in the unexpected direction. Results are discussed in terms of current hypotheses regarding the hemispheric lateralization of prosodic cues. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.