Communication Impairments in Patients with Right Hemisphere Damage

Right brain damages can manifest deficits of communicative skills, which sometimes cause an important inability. The communication impairments following a right hemisphere damage are distinct from those in aphasia and may affect discursive, lexico-semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic components of communication. It is calculated that this troubles affect almost a 50% of this patients. However, these impairments have essentially been studied separately and their possible coexistence in a same individual is still unknown. Moreover, the clinical profiles of communication impairments following a right hemisphere damage, including their correlation with underlying cognitive deficits, are still unreported. The goal of this article is to offer an overview of the verbal communication deficits that can be found in right-hemisphere-damaged individuals. These deficits can interfere, at different levels, with prosody, the semantic processing of words and discourse and pragmatic abilities. In spite of the incapability that they produce, communicational impairments in right brain damaged are usually neglected. Probably, the sub-diagnostic is due to the lack of an appropriate classification or to the absent of adequate assessment tools. In fact, patients with right brain damages might present harsh communicational deficits but perform correctly on aphasia tests because the last ones are not designed to detect this kind of deficit but left brain damaged impairments. Increasing our knowledge about the role of the right-hemisphere in verbal communication will have major theoretical and clinical impacts; it could * Received: 18 February 2009, Revised: 19 May 2009, Accepted: 19 May 2009. © 2009 Associazione Oasi Maria SS. IRCCS / Città Aperta Edizioni 1 Universidad de Buenos Aires and Hospital Eva Perón Buenos Aires. 2 Université de Montréal and Centre de Recherche, Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal, e-mail: [email protected] 67 Life Span and Disability / XII, 1 (2009), 67-82 Communication Impairments in Patients with Right Hemisphere Damage Valeria Abusamra,1 Hélène Côté,2 Yves Joanette2 & Aldo Ferreres1 facilitate the diagnosis of right brain patients in the clinical circle and it will help to lay the foundations to elaborate methods and strategies of intervention.