The effects on verbal communication skills of right hemishere stroke in middle age

Abstract

Eighty-one right-handed middle-aged subjects (64 non-brain-damaged and 17 right hemisphere stroke) were assessed on a series of verbal comprehension and spoken discourse tasks. Educational level was found to affect the performance of the non-brain-damaged subjects who represented three standards of education. Comparison of the stroke subjects with the appropriate educational controls showed the stroke group to be weaker in several aspects of spoken language comprehension, particularly metaphor and inference. In picture description the non-brain-damaged groups used more words, spoke for longer and produced more information. In conversation, limited facial expression and eye contact and monotonous intonational pattern were characteristic of the stroke subjects, but other discourse parameters such as verbosity and topic maintenance did not distinguish these right-brain-damaged and non-brain-damaged groups. The results highlight first the requirement for language task control data to be education referenced, and secondly the association between right brain damage and deficits in verbal communication.