Question Use Following Right Hemisphere Brain Damage.
Pragmatic communication deficits are among the most recognized deficits following right hemisphere brain damage (RHD). Deficits in one’s ability to comprehend and produce appropriate language leads to conversational exchanges that are often unsuccessful. Research to explore the nature of these deficits has focused primarily on the influence of language comprehension deficits while language production deficits have been relatively unexplored. Questions are the most explicit avenue of gathering information. While ineffective question use has recently been observed in individuals following RHD, there are no known published studies that investigate question use specifically. The purpose of this study was to determine if people with RHD use questions differently than people with no history of brain damage (NBD) during structured tasks and, if so, in what ways. Chi-square and two-sample t-tests were employed to determine differences in question use. Correlation analyses were conducted to determine if the use of specific types of questions were associated with cognitive-linguistic performance and empathy. Results showed that participants with RHD used questions less frequently and differently than participants with NBD. There were significant group differences in the quantity and quality of questions used during structured discourse tasks. Moreover, the distribution of question types was different, especially with respect to the discourse tasks, suggesting that, in participants with RHD, the use of specific types of questions may vary depending on the task. No significant correlations were noted between question type and cognitive-linguistic performance measures or question type and empathy scores.
