0 Bach, D. R. Herdener, M. Grandjean, D. Sander, D. Seifritz, E. Strik, W. K. 2009 Schizophrenia Research 110 1-3 180-187 emotional prosody, auditory, appraisal, prosody, speechm schizophrenia <div>Alterations of cerebral lateralisation in schizophrenia have been reported consistently, and a</div><div>reduced left-lateralisation has been suggested for language functions. Speech contains nonverbal</div><div>information, e.g. prosody, and on a behavioural level, the extraction of emotional</div><div>information from prosody is often impaired in schizophrenia. A previous functional magnetic</div><div>resonance imaging study suggests increased left-lateralisation in schizophrenia during prosody</div><div>processing, but did not disentangle effects of speech processing as such and emotional prosody</div><div>processing. Here, we used meaningless syllables spoken with neutral, angry or fearful speech</div><div>melody and measured blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses in 15 in-patients with</div><div>schizophrenia and 15 healthy control participants matched for age and gender. Lateralisation</div><div>indices were calculated for responses to emotional versus neutral prosody, and for all types of</div><div>prosody versus baseline. Compared to control participants, patients with schizophrenia showed</div><div>an increased right-lateralisation of emotional and non-emotional prosody processing in the</div><div>temporal and parietal cortex. This right-lateralisation was increased in patients with reduced</div><div>right-handedness and decreased in patients with stronger negative symptoms, particularly</div><div>affective blunting, and with longer hospitalisation. Although patients with schizophrenia</div><div>performed worse in emotion identification, this deficit was not related to lateralisation indices.</div><div>Enhanced right-lateralisation to prosody resembles previous findings on laterality changes in</div><div>speech processing and might suggest a common underlying cause in the organization of</div><div>language functions.</div>