Decoding paralinguistic signals: Effects of semantic and prosodic cues on aphasic's comprehension

A matching task between sentences voiced with joyful, angry, or sad intonation and pictures of facial expressions representing the same emotions is proposed to 27 aphasics and 20 normal subjects. Semantic contents are either meaningless, neutral, or affectively loaded. In the affective-meaning condition, content is redundant with prosody or conflicting with it. Results are 1. a greater number of nonprosodic choices in the aphasic group; 2. an identical influence of the congruence/conflict variable on aphasics and control subjects; 3. an identical influence of the semantic content of the conflict sentences on both groups. Aphasic impairment is interpreted as purely quantitative, since affective semantic content influences the decoding of the sentences