Informative content of narrative discourse in right-brain-damaged right-handers

Thirty-six right-brain-damaged (RBD) right-handers and 20 controls (C) were submitted to a narrative production task using the pictorial representation of a trivial story. Each subject's narrative was analyzed, using a "propositional analysis," in order to study amount as well as nature of informative content. Results show that RBD subjects' narratives contain a smaller amount of information that did not appear to be related to a smaller amount of verbal output or to the presence of a visual neglect, that the information contained in RBD subjects' narratives appears to be a subset of that contained in C subjects' narratives, and that these results do not pertain to all C or RBD subjects, since both groups are nonhomogeneous. Even though these results are not linked to the presence of some visual neglect or visual agnosia per se, they could be, at least in part, the expression of some degree of perceptive difficulties of the iconography. However, they are also interpreted as expressing a problem with the organization of narrative discourse at levels of cognitive processing which may not be exclusive to language, but which are nonetheless essential for discourse organization.