FRACTIONATION OF THE COMPONENTS OF ROLE-PLAY IN A RIGHT-HEMISPHERIC LESIONED SIGNER

Role play, a narrative device relying critically on the linguistic ref erence system of American Sign Language (ASL), also appropriates extra syntactic devices such as signing style idiosyncrasies and facial cari cature for the linguistic purpose of differentiating roles. Whereas th e spatialized grammatical reference system has been shown to make dema nds on left hemisphere processing, role play may require right hemisph ere processing. To investigate this issue we analysed role play in a 3 8-year-old, ASL-fluent, female hearing signer (A. S.) with a right par ietal-occipital lesion. A.S, correctly reassigned first person referen ce, signalling attempted use of role play at the sentence level, despi te its spatialized realization in ASL. However, she had difficulty wit h pragmatically appropriate changes in gaze direction, and with the us e of caricature and shifts in body position, to distinguish roles. Ana lysis of the deficits in this right-lesioned signer's use of a single Linguistic construction that crucially requires both sentence-level an d discourse-level devices helps us to refine our concept of the roles of the two cerebral hemispheres in language functions.