Contextual influences on comprehension of multiple-meaning words by right hemisphere brain-damaged and non-brain-damaged adults

This investigation examined the influence of context on the interpretation of denotative and connotative meanings of homographs in right hemisphere brain-damaged (RHBD) and non- brain-damaged (NBD) adults. Subjects were required to choose the meaning of homographs in linguistically unbiased ambiguous sentences and in denotatively and connotatively semantically biased narrative contexts. The NBD group was significantly more accurate than the RHBD on the sentence and connotative narrative contexts. However, there was not significant difference between groups for the denotative narrative context. There were no significant differences between task contexts for the NBD group. The RHBD group was significantly more accurate on the denotative narrative than the sentence context but displayed no significant difference in performance on the connotative narrative versus sentence contexts. The findings suggest that right hemisphere brain damage may result in a reduced ability to process connotative components of word meaning, that does not appear to be aided by the presence of additional semantically supportive linguistic information