THE USE OF CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION RELATED TO GENERAL WORLD KNOWLEDGE BY RIGHT BRAIN-DAMAGED INDIVIDUALS IN PRONOUN RESOLUTION

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.