Year: 1987
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Language Impairments Several researchers (Brownell, Potter and Michelow, 1984; Gardner and Denes, 1973) have addressed individuals' abilities to understand denotative (i.e., literal, dictionary-type meaning) versus connotative (i.e., meaning inferred from context) meaning. The results from these studies revealed that the right hemisphere damaged patients relied on denotative meaning whereas left hemisphere damaged patients relied more on meaning relations based on connotation. Gardner and Denes (1973) interpreted this finding as indicating two separate lexical stores as a function of hemispheric specificity, whereas Brownell et al. (1984) attributed these deficits to organization of different cognitive structures. These results may also be interpreted in another manner regarding information processing style. The right hemisphere damaged individuals' inability to understand connotative meaning may have been a function of the disruption of the gestalt processing style which allows us to comprehend linguistic meaning with a broader scope (i.e., utilization of other cues such as contextual information) and beyond its literal linguistic form. Similar disruptions have been reported in the right hemisphere damaged individuals' ability to understand humor, idioms and metaphor.
Source: The Mathematics Enthusiast
Author: Kathleen D. Sims
Institution: University of Montana
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2469914631