We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior…

Although there is a strong link between the right hemisphere and understanding emotional prosody in speech, there are few data on how the right hemisphere is implicated for understanding the emotive "attitudes" of a speaker from prosody. This report describes two experiments which compared how listeners with and without focal right hemisphere…

Hemispheric contributions to the processing of emotional speech prosody were investigated by comparing adults with a focal lesion involving the right (n=9) or left (n=11) hemisphere and adults without brain damage (n=12). Participants listened to semantically anomalous utterances in three conditions ("discrimination," "identification," and…

The present investigation focussed on the neural substrates underlying linguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues. A production experiment was conducted to examine the ability of left- (LHD) and right- (RHD) hemisphere-damaged patients and normal controls to use temporal and fundamental frequency cues to disambiguate sentences…

Spoken language comprehension requires the coordination of different subprocesses in time. After the initial acoustic analysis the system has to extract segmental information such as phonemes, syntactic elements and lexical-semantic elements as well as suprasegmental information such as accentuation and intonational phrases, i.e., prosody.…