A selective deficit in the production of exact musical intervals following right-hemisphere damage.

In this study we focused our attention on the production of music in its vocal form. To our knowledge this is the first detailed description of a dissociation between encoding and retrieval of melodic intervals in music. We describe the case of a 55-year-old high-level amateur musician, IP, who had suffered a right-hemisphere stroke. While the patient performs well in music recognition and discrimination tasks, he is selectively impaired at singing correct intervals. More precisely, IP's performance relative to the rhythm and the contour retrieval of musical patterns is preserved; his impairment is limited to precise pitch retrieval and it is highly correlated to the degree of dissonance of the intervals he is required to sing. These findings are discussed relative to previous works in neuropsychology of music with regard to both functional models and brain function localisation. An extended version of the model proposed by Peretz (1993b) is presented.

Singing: a selective deficit in the retrieval of musical intervals.

A case of dissociation between discrimination and retrieval of musical information in a patient with a lesion of the right hemisphere is described. This patient has lost the ability to correctly retrieve a musical interval when required to sing. This occurs in the presence of unimpaired interval discrimination and correct retrieval of temporal patterns and melodic contour (direction).

Derivation by prefixation in Slovenian: two aphasia case studies.

The present study is concerned with two Slovenian-speaking patients who were asked to produce, in various tasks, verbs, nouns, and adjectives derived by prefixation with prepositions. Despite differences due to their specific linguistic difficulties, both patients' performance was characterized by the differential processing of prefixes and remaining components of complex words. Prepositions in prefixation were mostly preserved, and less frequently substituted, regardless of the numerous errors produced in the remaining portion of the words. These errors seem clearly determined by the morphological structure of the words and therefore appear to be authentic morphological errors. These findings contribute to the theoretical debate on mental lexical representation, speaking in favor of a morphological decomposition in processing of prefixed complex words at different processing levels.