Effects of cortical and subcortic processing of emotio

Cortical and subcortical contributions to the processing of emotional speech prosody were evaluated by testing adults with single focal lesions involving the right hemisphere (n=9), adults with basal ganglia damage in idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (n=21), and healthy aging adults (n=33). Participants listened to semantically-anomalous utterances in two conditions (identification, rating) which assessed their recognition of five prosodic emotions. Findings confirmed that both right hemisphere and basal ganglia pathology were associated with impaired comprehension of prosody, although possibly for distinct reasons: right hemisphere compromise produced a more pervasive insensitivity to emotive features of prosodic stimuli, whereas basal ganglia disease produced a milder and more quantitative impairment on these tasks. The implications of these findings for differentiating cortical and subcortical mechanisms involved in prosody processing are considered.