Aprosodia in Chinese patients with right cerebral hemisphere lesions.

Recent publications, all involving native speakers of English, have established that lesions in the right cerebral hemisphere produce a deficit in the comprehension and execution of tonal change in language related to the affective component of prosody. We tested 12 Chinese patients with right-hemisphere lesions and seven controls for comprehension, discrimination, repetition, and expression of prosody and gesture. In 11 of the 12 patients, aprosodia was identified. The subjects were also tested for their ability to detect semantic tonal difference in Chinese. Only five of the 12 showed a mild deficit in this task, suggesting that the left cerebral hemisphere is more dominant for comprehension of tone essential to word meaning.