Right Hemisphere Communication Disorders

Question 1

Diminished speech prosody

Answer 1

problems in producing normal prosody and recognizing prosody in others, slow rate, reduced emphatic stress (where we change our voice to place emphasis on a specific word), reduced pitch variability (mono-tone sounding).

Question 2

Anomalous content/poor organization of connected speech

Answer 2

confabulatory, inappropriate, poor topic maintenance, excessive details, diminished informational content (pg. 409).

Question 3

Impaired comprehension of narratives

Answer 3

• have trouble understanding implied meanings, take figurative language literally, difficulty following the whole context of a conversation.
• May have trouble appreciating humor, possibly due to poor content integration
• Premature assumptions and inferences, inability to revise them once proven incorrect.
  - Using contextual cues in appropriately e.g., cups on the counter for the cookie theft picture.

Question 4

Pragmatic impairments

Answer 4

awkward turn taking in conversation, poor eye contact, problems understanding listener’s needs (e.g., topic introduction and change, breakdown repairs), can be egocentric in conversation, and impulsive.

Question 5

Visual neglect (definition)

Answer 5

is an attention deficit where pts fails to respond to information presented on the side opposite their brain lesion.

Question 6

Hemianopia vs. Visual Neglect

Answer 6

Patients with visual neglect can show impulsive visual searching and respond far too quickly to questions about things in their visual field.

Studies have shown that at a subconscious level, pts with visual neglect actually can see their left visual field, but they have difficulty attending to left-side stimuli.

Question 7

Hemianopia

Answer 7

• Retino-optic deficit
• Affects seeing areas of the visual field
• Pts eventually show awareness of the visual loss.
• Pts learn to compensate

Question 8

Visual Neglect

Answer 8

• A spatial-attentional deficit.
• Affects looking and searching
• Pts show unawareness of the deficit
• Pts have difficulty compensating