Zurif (1974)
ZURIF, Edgar B. “Auditory Lateralization: Prosodic and Syntactic Factors.” Brain and Language 1 (1974): 391-404.
Sets out to address whether
intonation is asymmetrically processed in the brain. (392)
Notes that although there appears to be a right-ear (and thus left-hemisphere) advantage for processing intonation, the matter, viewed through the lens of dichotic listening techniques, is somewhat complex:
a listener is not normally required to adopt the analytic strategy of separating the contour from the utterance. (393)
However,
ear advantage is determined less by the acoustic correlates of a linguistic property than by the use to which these correlates must be put. (395)
That is there must be some mechanism that farms out the input to the relevant brain centers for processing based on the needs of the individual utterance. If it is not something locatable within the acoustic signature of the stimulus itself, it must then rest in part on the expectations of the listener. How such expectations are established and manipulated in the mind is an open issue. One might suspect that these issues of expectancies would bleed into attempts to define the distinction between speech and music. As Zurif concludes:
if we are to understand how the left hemisphere mediates language, we need to continue to assess the properties of an utterance that are processed by the left hemisphere. As a corollary, isolating these properties will enable us both better to distinguish language from among other systems of communication and better to formulate psycholinguistic models in general.
And, one might add, such research might help us to better understand the complex interactions between the various outward forms, which human expressiveness may take.
