Language prosody and the right hemisphere

Groups of right hemisphere damaged, left hemisphere damaged aphasic and normal control subjects were assessed on a series of tests designed to examine discrimination and production of different aspects of linguistic prosody. These included lexical stress, intonation, emphatic stress, lexical stress in sentence contexts, language identification using prosodic cues, and prosody in discourse. The right hemisphere damaged subjects were significantly impaired on all of the tests as compared to the control subjects. Furthermore, they were impaired as compared to the left hemisphere damaged aphasic subjects on some of the tests. The results support the notion that the right hemisphere has an important role in the processing of linguistic prosody.