Alterações cognitivas, comunicativas e emocionais após lesão hemisférica direita: em busca de uma caracterização da Síndrome do Hemisfério Direito

Clustering and switching in verbal fluency: a comparison between control and individuals with brain damage

PURPOSE

The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the performance and strategies used by control subjects and patients with unilateral brain damage on phonemic and semantic Verbal Fluency tasks.

METHODS

The sample consisted of 104 participants divided into four groups (26 with left hemisphere damage and aphasia- LHDa, 28 with left hemisphere damage and no aphasia- LHDna, 25 with right hemisphere damage- RHD and 25 neurologically healthy control subjects). All participants were administered the phonemic ("M" letter-based) and semantic (animals) verbal fluency tasks from the Montreal-Toulouse Language Assessment Battery (MTL-BR).

RESULTS

Patients in the LHDa group showed the worst performance (fewer words produced, fewer clusters and switches) in both types of fluency task. RHD group showed fewer switching productions when compared with controls and LHDna had fewer words productions than controls in the first 30 seconds block.

CONCLUSION

Our findings suggest that the LHDa group obtained lower scores in most measures of SVF and PVF when compared to the other groups.

Impairment of inferential abilities based on pictorial stimuli in patients with right-hemisphere damage

Inferences are mental representations derived from the interaction between explicit linguistic information and an individual's world knowledge. The right hemisphere (RH) is the main region responsible for this ability, particularly with regard to pictorial stimuli. The aims of this study were to evaluate the performance of RH-damaged patients on an inference comprehension task based on pictorial stimuli and to compare the effect of different lesion sites on this performance. We compared the inferential abilities of 75 healthy controls and 50 patients with RH damage of vascular origin using 13 pictorial stimuli from the instrument "300 Exercises of Comprehension of Logical and Pragmatic Inferences and Causal Chains." RH-damaged patients performed worse than controls in comprehending logical and pragmatic visual inferences independent of lesion site (p < .0001). The subgroup with posterior lesions performed worse than the other subgroups.

Studies on semantic priming effects in right hemisphere stroke: A systematic review

The role of the right cerebral hemisphere (RH) associated with semantic priming effects (SPEs) must be better understood, since the consequences of RH damage on SPE are not yet well established.

The generation of visual inferences in normal elderly- Influence of schooling and visual complexity

The generation of inferences makes the construction and comprehension of discourse easier, and integrates representations which add coherence to the arguments. Visuoperceptual and inferential deficits merge in the attempt to explain the difficulties that some individuals have in the comprehension of certain kinds of visual stimuli.