Affective prosody in the reading voice of stroke patients.

Patients with right or left hemisphere strokes were studied for the nature of emotion conveyed in speech, during the reading of three short passages chosen for the differing emotional tone of their content. Both groups of patients had prosodic qualities which led their speech to be rated as like that of depressed patients and different from that of non-depressed controls. None of the stroke patients had significant depression or anxiety at the time of testing, so this prosodic quality is presumed to relate directly to brain damage.