The role of the right hemisphere in the control of speech prosody in propositional and affective contexts.

Sixteen right-handed adult males with localized insult to either the right or left hemisphere and five control subjects without brain damage read aloud target sentences embedded in paragraphs, while intoning their voices in either a declarative, interrogative, happy, or sad mode. Acoustical analysis of the speech wave was performed. Right-anterior (pre-Rolandic) and right-central (pre- and post-Rolandic) brain-damaged patients spoke with less pitch variation and restricted intonational range across emotional and nonemotional domains, while patients with right posterior (post-Rolandic) damage had exaggerated pitch variation and intonational range across both domains. No such deficits were found in patients with left posterior damage, whose prosody was similar to that of normal control subjects. It is suggested that damage to the right hemisphere alone may result in a primary disturbance of speech prosody that may be independent of the disturbances in affect often noted in right-brain-damaged populations.