Expressive aprosodia following stroke to the right basal ganglia: A case report.

Presented here is a case report of a 16-year-old adolescent who, after experiencing an embolic stroke to subcortical structures of the right hemisphere, evidenced motor aprosodia. The patient was administered a test of receptive emotional prosody. In addition, the patient was asked to state a series of stimulus sentences to determine if she was able to spontaneously convey emotions (happy, sad, mad) appropriately and was asked to repeat a series of stimulus sentences to determine if she could convey the same emotions as the speaker. She demonstrated aprosodic-agestural speech, aprosodic repetition, and good prosodic comprehension. This case report supports the notion of right-hemisph ere organization of the emotional aspects of language and the existence of subcortical aprosodias analogous to subcortical aphasias. John Hughlings Jackson (Taylor, 1958) stated that there are two modes of expression, emotional and intellectual. The intellectual mode of expression (e.g., vocabulary and grammar) is related to Jackson's concept of prepositional speech, which he believed to be a function of the languagedominant (typically left) hemisphere (Taylor, 1958). Jackson's emotional mode of expression is related to Monrad-Krohn's (1947) concept of prosody, which involves the melodic line of language produced by the variations of pitch, rhythm, and stress of pronunciation that bestows certain semantic and emotional meaning to speech. Emotional prosody represents the insertion of emotional feeling into speech to convey anger, pleasure, fear, sorrow, and so forth (Ross & Mesulam, 1979). In fact, Jackson