Tone of Voice and Mind : The Connections between Intonation ...

28 Chapter 2
Level of Linguistic
Complexity
Left
Hemisphere
Right
Hemisphere
Phoneme Auditory segmentation Intonational decoding
Word Denotation Connotation
Close associations Distant associations
Noun-adjective phrase Literal meaning Metaphorical meaning
S-V-O (etc.) clause Syntactic decoding ???
Sentence Propositional meaning Affective implications
Paragraph Explicit event-by-event
meaning
Implicit meaning
(“gist”, “point”, “moral”)
Discourse Sequentialization Contextualization
Figure 2-2. A schema of the multiple levels of bilateral language processing. The horizontal
arrows indicate levels at which the cerebral hemispheres may interact via the
corpus callosum. The vertical arrows indicate the bottom-up sequential processing
from smaller to larger linguistic units, as well as the top-down effects from larger to
smaller units. It is uncertain whether there is any type of right hemispheric processing
comparable to the syntactic decoding of the left hemisphere 2 (Cook 2002a, b).
Intonation
The loss of the affective prosody of speech following RH damage is well-known
clinically (Weniger 1984; Behrens 1989). As in music perception/production,
the two principal dimensions of the prosody of speech concern the temporal
dimension – i.e., the rhythm and timing of speech output, particularly consonant
stops – and the pitch dimension – i.e., the fluctuationinauditoryfrequency
of particularly vowel sounds. Abnormalities of timing and fine temporal
discrimination are found following LH damage, and may be a key factor