Background: Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) manifests itself in many ways. The repercussions affecting language function are distinct; studies in discourse comprehension in RHD groups suggest that this population struggles with the mental structures necessary for processing, leading to difficulty when a task requires that participants modify their established mental models or alter first interpretations. The current investigation was based on an experiment in Rapp et al.s (2001) study that suggests that trait-based models of discourse processing affect online reading. Participants response times slowed when the final sentences of the story stimuli were inconsistent with character traits instantiated in the beginning of the stories.
Aims: The current study examined the nature of discourse comprehension difficulties in adults with right hemisphere brain damage, specifically observing how participants with RHD performed in accuracy and response times when presented stories with inconsistencies in character trait portrayal.
Methods and Procedures: Participants included eight adults with RHD and five with no brain damage (NBD). Participants listened to 20 stimuli featuring either a neutral or trait-instantiating first portion (describing a specific trait of a character), followed by a trait-consistent or trait-inconsistent final sentence. Asked to make a rapid judgment concerning whether the final sentence of each story fit with the personality of the character featured in that story, the subjects chose yes or no on a manual response box. Ancillary tasks were used to assist in classifying the clinical characteristics of participants and to provide potential alternative interpretations of participants performances.
Outcomes and Results: The results of this study suggest that when character traits are strongly negative and/or strongly implied, adults with RHD appear to incorporate these character biases in their narrative processing, though these biases do not improve their judgments of trait-inconsistent information. As predicted, there were no group differences in trait-instantiating stories with the trait-consistent endings, but the participants with RHD were less accurate in the trait-inconsistent condition than the group with NBD. Supporting the studys main hypothesis, results indicate that adults with RHD are as able as control participants to accurately judge trait-consistent information, but are at a disadvantage when dealing with incongruity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04222009-181659 |
| Date | 30 April 2009 |
| Creators | Intintoli, Jessica L |
| Contributors | Connie A. Tompkins, David N. Rapp, Michael W. Dickey, Janice E. Vance |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04222009-181659/ |
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