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authors concluded that affective prosody is a multifaceted
process which cannot simply be explained by differences in
hemispheric specialization.
Studies of normals using dichotic listening tasks have
also been employed to explore hemispheric differences in
processing emotional prosody. In dichotic listening, two
different messages are simultaneously presented to the right
and left ears. Words were recalled best from the right ear
indicative of left hemisphere superiority (Kimura, 1967) ,
while mood of the speaker was recalled better from the left
ear, suggestive of right hemisphere superiority in
processing emotional prosody (Haggard & Parkinson, 1971; Ley
Sc Bryden, 1982) .
In contrast to the tasks involving nonverbal signals,
evidence for a unique role of the right hemisphere in
mediating emotional understanding of messages that are
conveyed through propositional language is equivocal.
Recognition of emotional words has been found to be better
when presented tachistoscopically to the right hemisphere
(Graves, Landis, & Goodglass, 1981). However, RHD and LHD
patients did not differ in the ability to comprehend the
meaning of emotional and nonemotional words (Morris et al.,
1992), the ability to identify emotionality of short
propositional sentences (Heilman et al., 1984; Cicone,
Wapner, & Gardner, 1980; Blonder, Bowers, Sc Heilman, 1991),