Listeners’ identification and evaluation of Korean idiomatic utterances produced by persons with left- or right-hemisphere damage

This study investigates the effects of left- (LHD) or right-hemisphere damage (RHD) on the production of matched idiomatic or literal expressions by examining healthy listeners’ abilities to identify, evaluate and perceptually characterize the utterances. Native speakers of Korean with LHD or RHD and healthy controls (HCs) produced six ditropically ambiguous (idiomatic or literal) sentences in an elicitation and a repetition task. Healthy listeners identified the sentence types and indicated how well each utterance represented the intended meaning. Perceptual ratings of voice quality were performed by expert listeners. The results indicate a negative effect of RHD on listeners’ identification and goodness ratings of utterance type. Repetition yielded better speech exemplars than elicitation. Sentence type was associated with selected voice qualities. These findings support previous reports of prosodic information serving to signal idiomatic versus literal meanings as well as a right-hemisphere involvement in formulaic language and the dual process model of language.