Cognitive-communication disorder following right hemisphere damage: Narrative production

BACKGROUND: Cognitive-communication disorder (CCD) results from the association of language and cognition impairment that may follow right hemisphere (RH) damage and impair the quality of life of affected persons. OBJECTIVE: We studied a set of 1,625 narratives produced by a cohort of 125 individuals (50 with a single right vascular lesion in the MCA territory and 75 cognitively healthy controls) using a task of picture-based discourse production. Discourse production was analyzed in its macro-and microlinguistic aspects to characterize better the linguistic mechanisms underlying RH patients' performance. RESULTS: The RH group produced more words and elocutions than controls, with a lower rate of informational content and a higher percentage of global coherence errors (all p-values <0.0001). CONCLUSION: Individuals with RH lesions showed formal lexical and syntactic aspects of discourse mostly preserved. Alterations in the macrostructure of discourse prevailed over microstructural alterations in our sample, according to most literature studies. The group of individuals with RH lesions produced narratives containing more words and utterances, with a lesser degree of lexical information and more global coherence errors.