Right-hemisphere pragmatic disorders

Margaret Lehman Blake

pp. 243-266

in: Louise Cummings (ed), Research in clinical pragmatics, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

Pragmatic deficits are a key component of the communication disorders related to right hemisphere brain damage. The deficits are heterogeneous and include expression and comprehension of prosody, emotion, humor and non-literal language, as well as discourse production and theory of mind. These pragmatic processes are complex and are subserved by extensive neural networks which often include both right and left hemisphere regions. As a result, it is rare to find clear connections between lesion localization and behavior, simple dichotomies of strengths and weaknesses, or consistent patterns of deficits across clients. More research is needed to explore the functional consequences of these deficits and how they can best be treated to improve quality of life for our clients with right hemisphere damage.