ABSTRACT
It was Monrad-Krohn (1947, 1963) who first brought to the attention of aphasiologists the importance of various elements of prosody and their disorders. Such prosodic elements include stress, intonation, rhythm, and tone, as well as different attitudes or emotions. Because the acoustical properties of these prosodic elements overlap to a great extent, we are provided an excellent opportunity for studying the role of the left and right hemispheres in the control of prosodic aspects of language. If physical correlates are of paramount importance in determining hemispheric specialization, then unilateral lesions should result in uniform behavioral deficits regardless of the linguistic status of the prosodic elements. If, on the other hand, linguistic considerations are triggering hemispheric specialization, then we may expect behavioral deficits to vary depending on the specific role of prosodic elements in language. Another possibility is that both hemispheres are engaged in prosody, but attending to different aspects of the speech acoustic signal.
