Speech prosody in affective contexts in Thai patients with right hemisphere lesions

Abstract

The production of speech prosody in emotional contexts was examined in Thai patients with unilateral right hemisphere damage. Twelve right hemisphere patients and nine normals read target sentences embedded in paragraphs that cued either a happy, sad, or neutral affect. Perceptual evaluations of their productions revealed a severe deficit in right hemisphere patients. Acoustic analysis indicated that longterm measures of fundamental frequency, timing, and energy at the sentence level were aberrant in right hemisphere patients. Findings are discussed in relation to nature and extent of prosodic deficits in right hemisphere patients, hemispheric specialization for linguistic and affective prosody, and the effect of language structure on the manifestation of affective prosody.