INFERENTIAL, ABILITIES OF NORMAL AND RIGHT-HEMISPHERE DAMAGED ADULTS

There were two aims of this study. The first was to compare indirect i nferencing abilities by nine right hemisphere brain-damaged (RHD) adul ts with 18 matched normal controls. The second purpose was to determin e the best condition in which to present information to the RHD indivi duals for the purpose of forming these inferences. Three conditions we re evaluated: (1) Auditory-Only, (2) Orthographic-Only, and (3) Combin ed Auditory/Orthographic. It was hypothesized that right hemisphere da maged persons would perform most successfully when the materials (narr ative paragraphs) were presented using the combined condition. Both gr oups performed significantly better in the combined Auditory/Orthograp hic condition. There were no significant differences in the performanc es of the RHD group as compared to the normal controls. This suggested that the RHD group did not exhibit an inference impairment on this ty pe of linguistic task.