Aprosodia, Aprosody

Aprosodia, Aprosody

Aprosodia or aprosody (dysprosodia, dysprosody) is a defect in or absence of the ability to produce or comprehend speech melody, intonation, cadence, rhythm, and accentuations, the nonlinguistic aspects of language which convey or imply emotion and attitude. Aprosodia may be classified, in a manner analogous to the aphasias, as:

• Sensory (posterior):
  • Impaired comprehension of the emotional overtones of spoken language or emotional gesturing, also known as affective agnosia; this may be associated with visual extinction and anosognosia, reflecting right posterior temporoparietal region pathology.
• Expressive/Motor (anterior):
  • An inability to produce emotional overtones ("emotional dysprosody", sometimes confusingly referred to as speech dyspraxia); this may occur in isolation with right sided anterior lesions, or in association with linguistic aspects of aphasia, such as agrammatism with anterior left hemisphere damage.

References

Monrad-Krohn GH. Dysprosody or altered "melody of language."
Brain 1947; 70: 405-415
Ross ED. The aprosodias: functional-anatomic organization of the affective components of language in the right hemisphere. Archives ofNeurology 1981; 38: 561-569

Cross References

Agnosia; Anosognosia; Aphasia; Aphemia; Broca’s aphasia; Fisher’s sign; Visual extinction