Abstract
Twenty-four children with discrete left or right hemisphere damage and 24 healthy controls were tested on their ability to judge the truth of embedded complements in sentences like ‘Max remembered that he locked the door’ and ‘Max remembered to lock the door’. Experimental sentences varied according to the type of matrix verb (know, remember or forget), the presence or absence of syntactic and/or lexical negation, and the syntax of the embedded complement (tensed or untensed). The results of a sentence-question task revealed hemispheric differences in syntactic, semantic and pragmatic language competence. Subjects with left hemisphere damage failed to vary their truth-value judgments according to the syntax of the sentence. In contrast, subjects with right hemisphere damage demonstrated a selective deficit in processing certain types of lexical-semantic and pragmatic information. These results converge with the adult neurolinguistic literature and suggest an early specialization of both hemispheres for certain types of language knowledge.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Eisele, J.A. (1991). Selective Deficits in Language Comprehension Following Early Left and Right Hemisphere Damage. In: Martins, I.P., Castro-Caldas, A., van Dongen, H.R., van Hout, A. (eds) Acquired Aphasia in Children. NATO ASI Series, vol 60. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3582-5_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3582-5_18
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