Cerebral mechanisms for understanding emotional prosody in speech

摘要: Hemispheric contributions to the processing of emotional speech prosody were investigated by comparing adults with a focal lesion involving right (n = 9) or left 11) hemisphere and without brain damage 12). Participants listened semantically anomalous utterances in three conditions (discrimination, identification, rating) which assessed their recognition five prosodic emotions under influence different task- response-selection demands. Findings revealed that right- left-hemispheric lesions associated impaired comprehension prosody, although possibly for distinct reasons: right-hemisphere compromise produced more pervasive insensitivity emotive features stimuli, whereas left-hemisphere yielded greater difficulties interpreting representations as code embedded language content.