Between language and space: a cross-domain interaction

We document for the first time the effect of a spatial deficit on an spoken language task. Right brain-damaged patients with and without neglect were administered a task of emphatic stress. Patients listened to 60 subject-verb-object sentence pairs. The emphatic stress could be placed on the subject, on the verb or on the object word. Patients had to judge whether the two sentences were same or different for the position of the emphatic stress. The judgements were more impaired in patients with neglect and when the stress was placed at the beginning of the sentence (on the subject word), that is to say, at the leftmost location of a hypothetical spatial representation of the heard sentence. We hypothesize that auditory language undergoes a spatial transcoding, and that this transcoding is affected by the presence of a spatial bias like that observed in patients with neglect.