Prosodic processing post traumatic brain injury - a systematic review

Whereas a great deal of research has been devoted to defining theneural bases of the segmental aspects of speech processing (see, e.g.,Scott & Wise, 2003 for a recent review of neuroimaging data), theneural substrate for prosodic processing has only recently garneredsubstantial attention. Recently, a cue lateralization perspective hasbeen proposed which purports that the LH is specialized for thecontrol of temporal parameters of speech, whereas the RH is specializedfor spectral parameters, particularly the processing of pitch(F0) (e.g., Van Lancker & Sidtis, 1992). With the advent of morefunctional neuroimaging studies of prosodic processing per se, severalmodifications to such theories have recently been proposed. In particular,Gandour et al. (2003) have posited a distinction among levelsof linguistic structure that correspond to relatively short (syllablesizedassociated with LH processing) and longer (phrase or sentencelevelassociated with RH processing) windows or prosodic domains(c.f. Baum & Dwivedi, 2003).There has recently been a surge of interest in subtle, but importantlinguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues(e.g., Baum, Pell, Leonard, & Gordon, 1997). The current experimentadds to this work by examining the use of prosody in syntacticdisambiguation for different sentence types which include or excludeintonational phrase level (IPh) prosodic boundaries (Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel, & Fong, 1991)