Discourse Studies in Neurologically Impaired Populations: A Quest for Action

Abstract

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Text comprehension after brain injury: Left prefrontal lesions affect inference processes.

“…Brownell & Martino, 1998;McDonald, 1993;Stemmer, 1999). First, the selection of appropriate patient and control groups is crucial.…”

Higher-Order Reasoning Training Years After Traumatic Brain Injury in Adults

“…46 Whereas adults with aphasia present with relatively intact gist processing ability and decreased memory for details, individuals with right hemisphere brain damage demonstrate impaired gist-processing ability and relatively intact memory for details. [47][48][49][50] Adults with Alzheimer's disease experience both gist and detail deficits. 51 A recent study with adolescents with moderate to severe TBI identified impaired gist-reasoning despite intact memory for explicitly stated details of texts.…”

Conversation after right hemisphere brain damage: Motivations for applying conversation analysis

“…A reviewer insightfully observed that this distinction likely has neurological and/or cognitive correlates, and that this is an arena to which CA is not directly sensitive. How the kinds of analyses that CA generates can be 'married' with current models of brain/mind functioning is an inordinately complex and fascinating issue; and one that researchers working with communication disorders might be uniquely placed to investigate (see Schegloff, 2003a;b). In the context of the present discussion, it is argued that CA's potential contribution will initially take the form of data-driven elaborations of how the conduct of people with RHBD can be viewed in light of various local interactional contingencies.…”

“…see Sherratt and Penn, 1990;Myers, 1999;Stemmer, 1999;Lehman Blake, 2005). Although much of this research has focused on narrative and procedural discourse (Kennedy, 2000), a number of researchers have intentionally focused on conversation (e.g.…”