The effects of right-hemisphere brain damage on patients' use of terms of personal reference

Successful communication depends on social as well as linguistic factors. In conversation, for example, a speaker must often refer to another person. Choosing an appropriate term of personal reference requires a speaker to consider several features of the discourse context, including properties of the persons being referred to and what knowledge is shared between the speaker and his or her addressee. In a pair of similar studies, we examined how right-hemisphere brain-damaged (RHD) patients and nonbrain-damaged control subjects use these different kinds of information in choosing formal (e.g., "Mr. Harding") versus informal ("Oliver") terms of reference for an absent third person. Stimulus vignettes manipulated three variables: the occupational status of the referent, the speaker's familiarity with the referent (i.e., the degree to which the speaker and referent were personally acquainted), and the addressee's familiarity (i.e., the degree to which the addressee and referent were personally acquainted). Relative to the control subjects, the RHD patients showed decreased use of both familiarity variables when choosing formal over informal labels, but apparently preserved sensitivity to the status variable. These results suggest how decreased use of the knowledge shared between a speaker and addressee disrupts RHD patients' discourse and thus contributes to these patients' aberrant interpersonal behavior. In addition. In addition, the results from the second study demonstrated an asymmetry in how female versus male subjects responded to the status manipulation.