Research note: The ability of individuals with right-hemisphere damage to use context under conditions of focused and divided attention

Abstract

A word-monitoring task was conducted with a group of right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients and a group of nonbrain-damaged control (NC) participants under three attention conditions—isolation, focused attention, and divided attention—to address the hypothesis that individuals with RHD experience difficulty in the use of contextual information under conditions that tax processing resources. Following Leonard et al. [Leonard, C. L., Baum, S. R., & Pell, M. D. (2001). The effect of compressed speech on the ability of right-hemisphere-damaged patients to use context. Cortex 37, 327–344], monitoring targets were embedded in three types of sentence contexts: normal, semantically anomalous, and random word order. Results revealed that, under all three attention conditions, monitoring latencies for the RHD patients paralleled those of the NC participants, revealing sensitivity to contextual manipulations. These findings support those of Leonard et al. and suggest that individuals with RHD are, indeed, able to use certain types of contextual information in language processing even under conditions of reduced processing resources. The results are discussed in relation to potential processing distinctions between structural and nonstructural contexts.