13 - Affective prosody

Summary

This chapter considers the topic of affective prosody as an important aspect of language that appears to be lateralized to the right hemisphere. Kinesics refers to facial, limb, and body movements associated with language and communications. Monrad-Krohn divided prosody into four major components: intrinsic, intellectual, emotional, and inarticulate. Intrinsic prosody enhances and clarifies the linguistic aspects of a language through judicious use of stress pauses and intonation without altering words. Emotional prosody infuses speech with primary types of emotions such as fear and anger. Monrad-Krohn also described various clinical disorders of prosody caused by brain injury or disease. Hughlings Jackson suggested that the emotional aspects of language and communication might be dominant functions of the right hemisphere. The specific combinations of affective-prosodic deficits following localized lesions in the right hemisphere appeared to be reasonably analogous to the functional-anatomic relationships of aphasic deficits observed after focal left brain damage.