While memory deficits in aphasia have been reported in several studies, it has been suggested that these deficits are not due to the presence of aphasia, but rather to the left hemisphere lesion per se. In order to investigate this hypothesis, we tested 64 aphasic and 15 non-aphasic patients with left brain damage on verbal and visuospatial span tasks. Analyses revealed lower than expected perf...

The right cerebral hemisphere may be relatively specialized for parsing simple visual stimuli according to default rules, such as the Gestalt laws of perceptual organization, whereas the left cerebral hemisphere may be relatively specialized for overriding such default rules. We extend this model to 'semantically rich domains' by performing a divided-visual-field experiment on 16 chessmasters. ...

Introduction Due to structural characteristics of the visual pathways, stimuli that are presented in the right half of the visual field (RVF) are initially projected to the left cerebral hemisphere, while those presented in the left half of the visual field (LVF) are projected to the right cerebral hemisphere. This anatomical feature has frequently been taken to support the notion that the well...

In this article, the current state of our knowledge of pragmatic disorders in adults with language impairment is assessed. A brief historical background of clinical pragmatics is presented, and the place of adult language pathology within the development of this field is discussed. A comprehensive review is undertaken of pragmatic deficits in adults with language impairments of diverse etiologi...

In a probability guessing experiment, subjects try to guess which of two events will occur next. Humans tend to match the frequency of previous occurrences in their guesses. Animals other than humans tend to maximize or always choose the option that has occurred the most frequently in the past. Investigators have argued that frequency matching results from the attempt of humans to find patterns...

Functional neuroimaging studies have shown enhanced right-hemisphere language activations in adults with left-hemisphere damage. We hypothesized that this effect would be stronger in patients with lesion occurring early in development. Using [15O]-water PET, we studied eight normal adults and 23 patients with unilateral left lesion during rest, listening to sentences, and sentence repetition. T...

Text processing requires inferences for establishing coherence between successive sentences. In neuropsychological studies and brain imaging studies, these coherence-building processes have been ascribed to the right hemisphere. On the other hand, there is evidence for prefrontal brain damage causing non-aphasic language disorders, in which text level processes are impaired. In this study, we u...