Alterations of cerebral lateralisation in schizophrenia have been reported consistently, and a

reduced left-lateralisation has been suggested for language functions. Speech contains nonverbal

information, e.g. prosody, and on a behavioural level, the extraction of emotional

information from prosody is often impaired in schizophrenia. A previous functional magnetic

resonance imaging study suggests increased left-lateralisation in schizophrenia during prosody

processing, but did not disentangle effects of speech processing as such and emotional prosody

processing. Here, we used meaningless syllables spoken with neutral, angry or fearful speech

melody and measured blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses in 15 in-patients with

schizophrenia and 15 healthy control participants matched for age and gender. Lateralisation

indices were calculated for responses to emotional versus neutral prosody, and for all types of

prosody versus baseline. Compared to control participants, patients with schizophrenia showed

an increased right-lateralisation of emotional and non-emotional prosody processing in the

temporal and parietal cortex. This right-lateralisation was increased in patients with reduced

right-handedness and decreased in patients with stronger negative symptoms, particularly

affective blunting, and with longer hospitalisation. Although patients with schizophrenia

performed worse in emotion identification, this deficit was not related to lateralisation indices.

Enhanced right-lateralisation to prosody resembles previous findings on laterality changes in

speech processing and might suggest a common underlying cause in the organization of

language functions.