Context use by right-hemisphere-damaged individuals under a compressed speech condition

The effect of increased processing demands on context use by RHD individuals was examined using a word-monitoring task. Subjects were required to monitor for a target word in sentences that were either normal, semantically anomalous, or both syntactically and semantically anomalous. Stimuli were presented at two rates of speech--normal and compressed to 70% of normal. Contrary to expectations, the RHD group performed similar to normals in demonstrating an effect of context at both rates of speech. Results are discussed relative to recent studies of normal brain functioning that suggest that the involvement of the LH versus the RH in context use depends upon the type of contextual information being processed.