Exploring the contribution of the cerebral hemispheres to language comprehension deficits in adults with developmental language disorder

A divided visual field, priming paradigm was used to observe how adults who have a history of developmental language disorder (DLD) access lexically a mbiguous words. The results show that sustained semantic access to subordin ate word meanings (such as BANK-RIVER), which is seen in control subjects, is disrupted in the right cerebral hemisphere for this special population o f renders. In the left hemisphere, only the most dominant meaning of the am biguous word shows sustained priming in both controls and DLD participants. Therefore, fur the DLD readers the subordinate meanings of words are not p rimed in either hemisphere and, thus, may not be available during online pr ocessing and integration of discourse. This right hemisphere lexical access deficit might contribute to the language comprehension difficulties exhibi ted by adult readers with a history of DLD. (C) 2001 Academic Press.