Why Are the Right and Left Hemisphere Conceptual Representations Different?
Table 3
Results of studies conducted on patients with unilateral brain-damage with tasks devised to test semantic-lexical disorders of right brain-damaged patients.
Administered to R and LBD patients three word-picture matching tasks for a selective assessment of phonological, semantic, and syntactic comprehension.
They found that not only aphasic patients, but also, though to a smaller extent, RBD patients had a semantic comprehension deficit
Gave to RBD patients and normal controls a word-picture matching tasks (the Verbal Sound and Meaning Discrimination test) allowing semantic, phonemic and unrelated types of errors.
Patients with RBD obtained significantly more lexical-semantic errors than normal controls The number of semantic errors obtained by RBD patients was significantly lower than that obtained on the same tests by aphasic LBD patients [51].
Administered to RBD patients and normal controls two tests of semantic discrimination (auditory language comprehension and reading comprehension) and a test of phoneme discrimination.
Right hemisphere lesions consistently impaired semantic discrimination in the oral and written modality, but did not hamper phoneme discrimination. The number of errors obtained on the semantic tests by RBD patients was lower than that obtained on the same tests by aphasic LBD patients [53].
Used a speeded lexical decision task to investigate word-category deficits in patients suffering from lesions in the right hemisphere and in normal controls.
Patients with lesions in the right frontal lobe showed more severe deficits in processing action whereas those with lesions in their right temporo-occipital areas showed more severe deficits in processing visually related nouns.
