Higher linguistic functions in patients with cerebral strokes.

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Starting point: In communication, not only the understanding and production of words and sentences is important, but also the processing of additional linguistic information, the so-called linguistic contexts. Most research focuses on the word and sentence level, less often on text and rarely on linguistic contexts. At the same time, their results are inconsistent: some claim that the subdominant brain hemisphere is responsible for the processing of contexts, according to others, both brain hemispheres participate in these processes. The aim of the research was to investigate with the Test of Linguistic Contexts patients with vascular strokes in the right or left cerebral hemispheres and to find out which of them has a greater influence on the processing of additional linguistic information. Group: The sample consisted of 44 patients after stroke: 15 with a stroke in the left cerebral hemisphere and 29 with a stroke in the right hemisphere. For these clinical groups, control groups of healthy participants of the same education, gender and approximately the same age were created. Methods: In the research, a set of tasks was created for the diagnosis of six areas: pragmatics, macrostructure and inferences, figurative language, semantic system, paralinguistics and spatial perception. The obtained data were statistically processed using the methods of descriptive and inferential statistics. Results: Statistical processing confirmed significant differences between the clinical and respective control groups in almost all monitored areas. Between clinical groups, a significant difference appeared only in pragmatics and spatial perception. Conclusions: The results indicate that both cerebral hemispheres are involved in the perception and processing of linguistic contexts, and problems with their interpretation are present in the case of a lesion of any of them. These deficits can have a significant impact on the patient's communication and daily life.