Perception of Linguistic and Affective Prosody in Individuals with Aphasia

Abstract

The current study was carried out with the aim of testing the perception of linguistic and affective prosody in individuals with aphasia. Convenient sampling was followed for the recruitment of participants. Comparative group design was used. The participants were divided into two groups. The first group comprised of 10 individuals with aphasia while the second group comprised of 10 neurologically healthy individuals. The study was carried out in native and non-native languages of the participants. Based on this premise, two tasks were configured. The first task required the participants to judge the prosody of sentences in native language and the second task required the participants to judge the sentences based on the prosody in the non-native language. Mann Whitney U test was used to compare the performance of the two groups. Statistically significant difference between the two groups was found on both the tasks. The theoretical premise suggests that the linguistic prosody is affected in left brain damaged adults however, the affective prosody is spared in this population. The findings of the current study contradicted this result as perception of linguistic and affective prosody was found to be affected in persons with aphasia.