| This study focused on functional lateralization of temporal processing of language and music for 9 stroke patients and 9 normal controls. Subjects were asked to discriminate short versus long sounds in ABX tasks, and then to reproduce sequences of short and long sounds they heard. The rereproduction tasks consisted of sequences of 3, 4, and 5 sounds. The linguistic stimuli were nonsense CVC syllables, and the musical stimuli were computer-generated musical notes with the timbres of French horn and trombone. Both linguistic and music stimuli were controlled for frequency and intensity, and varied only for duration (i.e., 500ms and 750ms). Our findings are consistent with previous studies; the left hemisphere specializes in linguistic durational processing, while the right hemisphere in music durational processing. Moreover, both hemispheres appeared to work closely together in processing temporal information. Both left- and right-hemisphere damaged patients performed worse than controls. Most subjects performed better with music than language. Patients with left posterior lesions performed worse compared to patients with left or right anterior lesions, particularly with linguistic stimuli. Patients with right anterior lesions not only involved with temporal processing in music, but also in linguistic stimuli. Our study provided additional information regarding transient temporal processing in language and music. |
