A longstanding issue in psychology is the relationship between how we perceive the world and how we act upon it. Pitch deafness provides an interesting opportunity to test for the independence of perception and production abilities in the speech domain. We tested eight amusics and eight matched controls for their ability to perceive pitch shifts…

Pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere; linguistic pitch is further mediated by left cortical areas. This experiment investigates whether ear asymmetries vary in brainstem representation of pitch depending on linguistic status. Brainstem frequency-following responses (FFRs) were elicited by monaural stimulation of the left and…

The current study on German investigates Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) for the perception of sentences with intonations which are infrequent (i.e. vocatives) or inadequate in daily conversation. These ERPs are compared to the processing correlates for sentences in which the syntax-to-prosody relations are congruent and used frequently…