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Cognitive-communication disorder following right hemisphere damage: Narrative production
Eric Rodriguez1, Ariella Fornachari Ribeiro Belan1, Marcia Radanovic1
1Laboratorio de Neurociencias (LIM-27), Departamento e Instituto de Psiquiatria, Hospital das Clinicas HCFMUSP, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo, R. Dr. Ovídio Pires de Campos 785, São Paulo, SP, Brazil.
Cerebral Circulation - Cognition and Behavior
|November 3, 2022
Summary
Right hemisphere damage can cause cognitive-communication disorder (CCD), impacting language and cognition. Individuals with RH lesions produced more words but had less informational content and more coherence errors.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Cognitive-communication disorder (CCD) arises from impaired language and cognition, often following right hemisphere (RH) damage.
- CCD significantly affects the quality of life for affected individuals.
Purpose of the Study:
- To analyze discourse production in individuals with RH damage.
- To characterize the linguistic mechanisms underlying performance in RH patients.
Main Methods:
- Studied 1,625 narratives from 125 individuals (50 with RH vascular lesions, 75 healthy controls).
- Utilized a picture-based discourse production task.
- Analyzed discourse for macro- and microlinguistic aspects.
Main Results:
- The RH group produced more words and utterances than controls (p<0.0001).
- RH group exhibited a lower rate of informational content (p<0.0001).
- RH group showed a higher percentage of global coherence errors (p<0.0001).
Conclusions:
- Individuals with RH lesions largely preserved formal lexical and syntactic discourse aspects.
- Macrostructural discourse alterations were more prevalent than microstructural ones in the RH group.
- RH lesions led to narratives with increased word count, reduced lexical information, and more global coherence errors.
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