Hemispheric involvement in the perception of syntactic prosody is dynamically dependent on task demands.

The first aim of this study was to determine if there was a significant perceptual asymmetry for syntactic prosody and if it differed from the perceptual asymmetry for emotional prosody. The second aim of this study was to determine if the observed asymmetries were the product of task demands or stimulus features. Experiment 1 consisted of a Syntactic task and an Emotional task. In the Syntactic task, subjects identified Statement and Question prosody in dichotically presented sentences. In the Emotional task, subjects identified Angry and Sad prosody in dichotically presented sentences. There was a significant left ear advantage for the Emotional task and no significant ear advantage for the Syntactic task. In Experiment 2, subjects had to perform an Emotional prosody task with the syntactic Statement and Question prosody stimuli from Experiment 1. There was a significant left ear advantage, indicating that the perceptual asymmetry was determined by task demands and not stimulus features. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.