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The ability of right-brain-damaged (RBD) subjects to correctly insert a word into a well-formed stimulus sentence was tested. Subjects also performed three evaluative tasks designed to establish their degree of general cognitive impairment. The performance of RBD subjects on these tasks was compared to that of left-brain-damaged (LBD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) subjects. Although RBD subjects outperformed LBD subjects on the language-related evaluative tasks, the RBD group was significantly more impaired on a subset of the insertion task. This subset included items which required reassignment of the syntactic status of elements in the stimulus sentence in order for the insertion to be carried out. The results of this study permit refinement of the common characterization of RBD individuals as rigid in their interpretation of meaning and indicate right-hemisphere involvement in aspects of the grammar previously thought to be inaccessible to it.

This paper reports on a study which measures the relationship between the discrimination and production of segmental and prosodic elements in a second language. The measures employed in the study also served to assess the effects of a phonetic training program for French as a second language designed by the authors. Two questions are addressed in the present study: 1) Is there a systematic relationship between perception and production of the sound system in a second language? 2) What effect does a period of systematic discrimination training in the second language have on this relationship? The measures employed included tests of discrimination and production for French phones, rhythm, and prosody. The subjects' production test results were judged by highly trained, native speakers of French. Subjects for the study included a treated group which had undergone the phonetic training program and an untreated group which had not. Both groups were simultaneously enrolled in French as a second language courses. Testing took place prior to the start of the French courses and at the end of the semester immediately after they had finished. Although the results of the study indicate that discrimination ability initially exceeds production ability, they also suggest that explicit training may disrupt this relationship.