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A linguistic deficit resulting from right-hemisphere damage
1University of Ottawa, Department of Linguistics, Ontario, Canada.
Brain and Language
|May 1, 1988
Summary
Right-brain-damaged (RBD) individuals struggle with sentence insertion tasks requiring syntactic reassignment. This challenges the notion of right-hemisphere rigidity, suggesting its role in complex grammar.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
Background:
- Right-brain damage (RBD) is often associated with cognitive rigidity.
- Previous research has not fully elucidated the role of the right hemisphere in grammatical processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the sentence-insertion abilities of right-brain-damaged (RBD) subjects.
- To compare the performance of RBD subjects with left-brain-damaged (LBD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) individuals.
- To refine the understanding of cognitive functions associated with right-hemisphere damage.
Main Methods:
- Subjects with RBD, LBD, and NBD performed a word-insertion task into stimulus sentences.
- Evaluative tasks assessed general cognitive impairment.
- Performance was compared across the three subject groups.
Main Results:
- RBD subjects outperformed LBD subjects on language-related evaluative tasks.
- RBD subjects showed significant impairment on specific insertion task items.
- Impaired items required reassignment of syntactic status within the sentence.
Conclusions:
- The findings challenge the view of RBD individuals as solely rigid in meaning interpretation.
- Right-hemisphere involvement is indicated in grammatical processing, particularly in syntactic reassignment.
- This study refines our understanding of right-hemisphere contributions to language.