Coarse Coding and Discourse Comprehension in Adults with Right Hemisphere Brain Damage

This study assessed whether right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) adults’ priming of peripheral semantic features of nouns was associated with their discourse comprehension performance. A subset of RHD participants who were particularly poor comprehenders of implied information in discourse were also poor at sustaining activation for peripheral semantic features of nouns, relative to good RHD comprehenders. This result is consistent with a variant of the ‘coarse coding’ hypothesis of discourse comprehension in RHD. Continued research on RHD adults’ communicative strengths and weaknesses will have future implications for clinical assessment and management