Abstract
The narrative skills of nonaphasic individuals with right hemisphere damage (RHD)
were compared with those of a group of healthy participants. All participants scored
within the normal range on tests assessing their level of global cognitive impairment,
logical visuospatial reasoning, general linguistic skills, and the potential presence
of hemineglect. They were asked to describe the stories portrayed in a set of picture
sequences. The individuals with RHD produced descriptions with normal levels of microlinguistic
processing but with more tangential errors and conceptually incongruent utterances
that lowered their levels of informativeness. A further analysis revealed that these
deficits were most evident in persons with anterior lesions to the right hemisphere.
These findings lend indirect support to the hypothesis of a major involvement of frontal
right hemispheric areas to the process of organization of information in a narrative
discourse.
Keywords
Right hemisphere damage - narrative analysis - neurolinguistics - neuropsychology