Acoustic analysis of prosodic cues in left- and right-hemisphere-damaged patients

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Abstract
This study explored the ability of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) non-fluent aphasics, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients, and normal speakers to produce acoustic correlates of linguistic prosody. Productions of phonemic stress contrasts (e.g., black' board vs black board') and contrastive stress tokens (e.g., the man took the bus) were elicited and subjected to acoustic analyses. Results indicated that RHD and LHD groups resembled normal speakers in the use of fundamental frequency and amplitude to encode stress, indicating preserved abilities in both neurological populations. However, the LHD aphasic subjects demonstrated patterns of durational alterations that were statistically different from those obtained for the control and RHD groups. The data are indicative of a basic impairment in speech timing subsequent to LHD. Results are discussed in relation to current theories regarding the neurological basis of linguistic prosody.