Investigation of linguistic prosody in ischemic stroke

Prosody is a supra-segmental feature of language that functions to convey the speaker's emotional state and to provide linguistic clues about the syntactic structure of speech content. The widely accepted view in the literature on language research is that the left hemisphere is dominant in morphosyntactic, semantic and linguistic prosody, while the right hemisphere is involved in the pragmatic dimension of language and the processing of emotional prosody. In this study, we aimed to examine the linguistic prosodic perception (LPP) performance of individuals with Middle Cerebral Artery (MCA) ischemic stroke in receptive language. Twenty-one individuals diagnosed by the stroke unit, equalized in terms of education and age, with 11 left and 10 right MCA strokes and 21 healthy individuals were included in the study. The test used in the study consisted of 16 pairs of sentences, each sentence was played once to the participants and LPP in receptive language was examined. As a result of the study, it was found that MCA stroke impairs LPP regardless of hemisphere localization and there was no difference between the LPP performance of individuals with and without aphasia. LPP in receptive language was found to be associated with auditory comprehension and naming performance among the subtests of the Aphasia Language Assessment Tool. The LPP responses of individuals with MCA ischemic stroke were predominantly focused on items that were closer to the reality of the outside world.