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Idiosyncratic word associations following right hemisphere damage
1Department of Neurology, Boston University, School of Medicine.
Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology
|September 1, 1991
Summary
Right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients show intact word association but sometimes produce unrelated responses, suggesting an attentional deficit impacting pragmatic language.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Neurolinguistics
Background:
- The right hemisphere's role in lexical-semantic processing is not fully understood.
- Right-hemisphere damage (RHD) can lead to various cognitive and linguistic deficits.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the contribution of the right hemisphere to lexical-semantic processes.
- To analyze word associations in patients with RHD compared to healthy controls.
Main Methods:
- Single oral word associations were elicited from RHD patients and age-matched healthy controls.
- Response times, syntactic class, error types, and association frequency were analyzed.
- Stimulus words varied in grammatical category and imageability/concreteness.
Main Results:
- RHD patients did not differ from controls in response times, syntactic class, error rates, or high-frequency associations.
- However, RHD patients, especially those with frontal lesions, sporadically produced idiosyncratic or unrelated lexical responses.
- These pragmatic deviations suggest underlying attentional deficits.
Conclusions:
- While basic lexical access appears preserved, RHD can impair pragmatic aspects of language.
- Attentional disorders may underlie the production of contextually inappropriate word associations in RHD.
- Further research is needed to elucidate the right hemisphere's specific role in pragmatic language use.