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Cerebral specialization in processing intonation contours
Abstract
Two hypotheses have evolved in the literature regarding cerebral specialization in processing intonation contours. One position, the functional hypothesis, suggests that hemispheric lateralization is determined by the linguistic or nonlinguistic function of the intonation contour during sentence processing. The other hypothesis, the parallel hypothesis, states that prosody like music is always processed in the right hemisphere while the left hemisphere simultaneously processes the segmental properties of a sentence. The purpose of this dissertation was to test these hypotheses by systematically manipulating the functions of the intonation contours. Subjects participating in this study included a right hemisphere damaged (RHD) group, a left hemisphere damaged (LHD) group and a control group. Three experiments were designed to manipulate the functions of the intonation contours during sentence processing. Experiment 1 required subjects to categorically assign segmentally neutral sentences as either questions or statements depending upon the perception of the intonation contours. In Experiment 2, subjects listened to syntactically ambiguous sentences that were disambiguated by the locations of the prosodic boundaries and pointed to pictures that corresponded to the sentence meanings. Experiment 3 required subjects to match pairs of sentences from the two aforementioned experiments when segmental information was present (Condition 1) and when it had been removed (Condition 2). Results from this investigation did not support predictions made by either the parallel or functional hypotheses. Contrary to what was expected, both the RHD and LHD groups performed well in Experiments 1 and 3, Condition 1. The RHD group performed better than the LHD group in Experiment 2, although the RHD group did not do as well as expected. In Experiment 3, Condition 2 the RHD group did poorly and the LHD group did well. Although the data appear puzzling in light of predictions made by the functional and parallel hypotheses, another hypothesis is presented as an explanation for the pattern of observed results.
Subject Area
Speech therapy
Recommended Citation
Perkins, Judy Marie, "Cerebral specialization in processing intonation contours" (1994). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9420676.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9420676