Brain and Language 76, 1–17 (2001) doi:10.1006/brln.2000.2381, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on Lateralization of Prosody during Language Production: A Lesion Study Annett Schirmer, Kai Alter, Sonja A. Kotz, and Angela D. Friederici Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany Published online January 17, 2001 To examine brain lateralization of prosody during speech, the sentence production of six right-hemisphere-lesion patients and five left-hemisphere-lesion patients was compared to that of seven normal controls using a question–answer paradigm. The task required the prosodic realization of two different syntactic structures under conditions of wide and narrow focus. Acoustical analyses were carried out on F0 and time structure. These analyses revealed a preserved ability in patients to express differences in syntactic structure via prosody. However, there were deficits in distinguishing narrow focus from wide focus. Whereas both right- and left-hemisphere lesions caused impairments in the realization of F0, time structure was mainly impaired in left-hemisphere patients. Therefore, the present results from language production support functional as well as cue-dependent hypotheses of the lateralization of prosodic pro- cessing in the brain.  2001 Academic Press Key Words: prosody; dysprosody; hemispheric lateralization; speech production; prosodic parameters. Prosody serves a variety of functions that are mainly classified as linguistic and emotional. Linguistic functions, however, are known to be different across languages. In tone languages, such as Chinese or Thai, tone signals the meaning of a word and is therefore used for making lexical decisions. In nontone languages, such as English or German, lexical decisions are seldom based on a prosodic word pattern, but instead speech melody has its main function on a phrase and sentence level (Cutler, Dahan, & Donselaar, 1997). In the past 2 decades, much research has been focused on the neuronal correlates of prosody in tone as well as in nontone languages. Most studies compared prosodic perception or production in brain-damaged populations with normal subjects. Formu- lated theories, however, exist only for the perception domain. For instance, the Dou- ble Filtering by Frequency (DFF) Theory (Ivry & Robertson, 1998) proposes a cue- dependent representation of prosodic information in the brain. According to this theory, low frequencies are mainly processed by the right hemisphere, whereas high frequencies are mainly processed by the left hemisphere. Because the prosodic param- eter fundamental frequency (F0) is contained in the low-frequency portion of the speech signal, it is assumed to be lateralized to the right hemisphere. Support for The authors thank D. Y. von Cramon for his assistance in selecting the patients and describing the lesion locations. Patients were recruited from the Day Care Clinic of Cognitive Neurology at the Univer- sity of Leipzig. Further thanks to T. Penney for helpful comments on earlier versions of the article and K. Steinhauer for supporting work in progress. This work was supported by the Leibniz Science Prize awarded to A.D. Friederici and the German Research Foundation DFG (FR 519/17-2). Address correspondence and reprint requests to Annett Schirmer, Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Stephanstrasse 1a, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. E-mail: schirmer@cns.mpg.de. 1 0093-934X/01 $35.00 Copyright  2001 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.