| Three tasks based on earlier tests (Brownell et al., 1986; Kaplan et al., 1990; Shammi and Stuss, 1999) were administered to 7 right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients and 10 age- and education-matched healthy controls to assess whether an impaired overall ability to generate linguistic inferences is a major underlying factor contributing to communicative deficits associated with RHD. These tasks examined discourse comprehension and inference generation associated with three types of communicative contexts (disambiguating ambiguous linguistic information, joke appreciation, and pragmatic inferences related to sarcasm). Contrary to expectations, RHD patients' performance was qualitatively different from controls' only for the task requiring pragmatic inferences; for the remaining linguistic inference tasks, RHD subjects were only quantitatively different. The results suggest that the RHD subjects were specifically impaired in their ability to make inferences regarding communicative intention (CI) and are consistent with a model attributing RHD communication impairments to CI comprehension deficits (Sabbagh, 1999). |
