Cl. Leonard et al., THE USE OF CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION RELATED TO GENERAL WORLD KNOWLEDGE BY RIGHT BRAIN-DAMAGED INDIVIDUALS IN PRONOUN RESOLUTION, Brain and language, 57(3), 1997, pp. 343-359
Citations number
51
Categorie Soggetti
Language & Linguistics","Psychology, Experimental",Neurosciences
This study investigated the ability of right brain-damaged individuals
(RBD) to use contextual information to resolve ambiguous pronouns. Su
bjects were presented with sentence pairs and required to resolve the
ambiguous pronoun in the second sentence. Contrary to the prevailing v
iew that RED patients have difficulty using contextual information to
integrate language, the RED group demonstrated a normal pattern of res
ponse, demonstrating a sensitivity to the pragmatic information contai
ned in the leading sentence. They responded more quickly to sentences
with a pragmatically constrained preferred referent than to those sent
ences for which there was no preferred referent. As well, they chose t
he preferred referent significantly more often than the non-preferred
referent. These results suggest that RED patients can use contextual i
nformation at the level of a minimal discourse (i.e., two sentences).
(C) 1997 Academic Press.