Story arrangement ability in right brain-damaged patients

The purpose of the present study is to explore the role of an explicit expression of macrostructure in facilitating performance on a Story Arrangement Task. Subjects were presented with a series of sentences which they were required to arrange into a coherent paragraph. Half of the items were preceded by a theme sentence containing the framework or macrostructure of the paragraph, while the items without theme sentences required subjects to formulate their own macrostructure in a bottom-up fashion. Results of the study support the hypothesis that the presence of a theme sentence facilitates performance on the Story Arrangement Task for non-brain-damaged individuals (NBDs) and left brain-damaged patients (LBDs), but not for right brain-damaged patients (RBDs). This suggests that RBDs are impaired in their ability to recognize and benefit from explicit thematic statements in narratives. Other discourse-level deficits in RBDs are discussed in the light of these findings. The performance of LBDs on such tasks is also discussed.