Right hemisphere damage: Communication processing in adults evaluated by the Brazilian Protocole MEC – Bateria MAC

Right-brain-damaged individuals may present discursive, pragmatic, lexical-semantic and/or prosodic disorders. OBJECTIVE: To verify the effect of right hemisphere damage on communication processing evaluated by the Brazilian version of the Protocole Montréal d’Évaluation de la Communication (Montreal Communication Evaluation Battery) – Bateria Montreal de Avaliação da Comunicação, Bateria MAC, in Portuguese. METHODS: A clinical group of 29 right-brain-damaged participants and a control group of 58 non-brain-damaged adults formed the sample. A questionnaire on sociocultural and health aspects, together with the Brazilian MAC Battery was administered. RESULTS: Significant differences between the clinical and control groups were observed in the following MAC Battery tasks: conversational discourse, unconstrained, semantic and orthographic verbal fluency, linguistic prosody repetition, emotional prosody comprehension, repetition and production. Moreover, the clinical group was less homogeneous than the control group. CONCLUSIONS: A right-brain-damage effect was identified directly, on three communication processes: discursive, lexical-semantic and prosodic processes, and indirectly, on pragmatic process.