Prosodic Facilitation in the Resolution of Syntactic Ambiguities in Subjects with Left and Right Hemisphere Damage

• Published in: Brain and language Vol. 78; no. 2; pp. 169 - 196
• Main Authors: Walker, Judy Perkins, Fongemie, Kirk, Daigle, Tracy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.08.2001; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adult; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Aged; Ambiguity; Aphasia - diagnosis; Aphasia - physiopathology; Biological and medical sciences; Brain - physiopathology; Brain Damage; Cerebral Dominance; Female; Functional Laterality - physiology; Humans; Judgment - physiology; Key Words: prosody; Language and communication disorders; Linguistics; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; Neurology; Phonetics; Pilot Projects; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Random Allocation; Reaction Time; Severity of Illness Index; Speech Perception - physiology; stroke; Suprasegmentals; Syntactic Processing; syntax; Vascular diseases and vascular malformations of the nervous system; syntax; stroke; Key Words: prosody; Facilitation; Human; Nervous system diseases; Stroke; Verbal comprehension; Hemispheric specialization; Cardiovascular disease; Cognition; Cerebral disorder; Vascular disease; Prosody; Language; Central nervous system disease; Syntax; Cerebrovascular disease; Ambiguity
• ISSN: 0093-934X; 1090-2155
• DOI: 10.1006/brln.2001.2454

The purpose of this study was to determine if prosody facilitates the comprehension of sentences containing temporary syntactic ambiguities in control, and left (LHD) and right hemisphere damaged (RHD) subjects. To test for effects of prosodic facilitation, sentences were created where prosodic boundaries coincided with (cooperating), were absent (baseline), or conflicted (conflicting) with syntactic boundaries in three response times (RTs) experiments. Despite differences in overall RTs and response accuracy for each group, all three groups responded faster and more accurately to sentences in the cooperating than in the baseline and conflicting conditions across experiments, indicating that prosody facilitates syntactic parsing in brain-damaged subjects just as it does with normal control subjects. Results are discussed in relation to psycholinguistic theories of syntactic parsing and neurolinguistic theories of hemispheric specialization in processing the acoustic properties of prosodic structures.