Metaphor Comprehension in Right Brain-Damaged Patients with Visuo-Verbal and Verbal Material: A Dissociation (RE)Considered

Rinaldi, Martina; Marangolo, Paola; Baldassarri, Francesca

doi:10.1016/s0010-9452(08)70141-2

Cited by 70 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The poorer performances associated with having a left-sided seizure focus is consonant with recent imaging studies demonstrating greater recruitment of left frontal and temporal lobe regions in the interpretation of nonliteral speech (Lee & Dapretto, 2005;Rapp et al, 2004;Stringaris, Medford, Giampietro, Brammer, & David, 2005) and with patient studies demonstrating greater impairments in patients with left compared to right hemisphere lesions for interpreting nonliteral or ambiguous speech (Channon & Crawford, 2000;Keil et al, 2005). Although some studies suggest that the right hemisphere may play an important role in processing metaphoric and figurative language (Anaki, Faust, & Kravetz, 1998;Bottini et al, 1994;Brownell, Simpson, Bihrle, Potter, & Gardner, 1990;Rinaldi, Marangolo, & Baldassarri, 2004;Shammi & Stuss, 1999;Winner & Gardner, 1977), recent investigations indicate that the understanding of metaphors under very demanding linguistic situations, such as when sentence comprehension is involved, may rely more on left hemisphere processes (Faust & Weisper, 2000). In support of this interpretation, earlier research suggesting a special role for the right hemisphere in metaphor interpretation often used picture-matching tasks that relied less on lexical-semantic processes (Rinaldi et al, 2004;Winner & Gardner, 1977).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although some studies suggest that the right hemisphere may play an important role in processing metaphoric and figurative language (Anaki, Faust, & Kravetz, 1998;Bottini et al, 1994;Brownell, Simpson, Bihrle, Potter, & Gardner, 1990;Rinaldi, Marangolo, & Baldassarri, 2004;Shammi & Stuss, 1999;Winner & Gardner, 1977), recent investigations indicate that the understanding of metaphors under very demanding linguistic situations, such as when sentence comprehension is involved, may rely more on left hemisphere processes (Faust & Weisper, 2000). In support of this interpretation, earlier research suggesting a special role for the right hemisphere in metaphor interpretation often used picture-matching tasks that relied less on lexical-semantic processes (Rinaldi et al, 2004;Winner & Gardner, 1977). Therefore, the recruitment of left versus right hemisphere regions in metaphor processing may be task specific (Faust & Weisper, 2000).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Componential Analysis of Proverb Interpretation in Patients with Frontal Lobe Epilepsy and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Relationships with Disease-Related Factors

McDonald

Delis

Kramer

et al. 2008

The Clinical Neuropsychologist

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The ability to interpret nonliteral, metaphoric language was explored in patients with frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) and temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), and matched control participants, to determine (1) if patients with FLE were impaired in their interpretations relative to those with TLE and controls, and (2) if disease-related variables (e.g., age of seizure onset) predicted performances in either patient group. A total of 22 patients with FLE, 20 patients with TLE, and 23 controls were administered a test of proverb interpretation to assess their ability to grasp the abstract meaning of nonliteral language. Participants were presented with a series of proverbs and asked to provide an oral interpretation of each. Responses to each proverb were scored according to their accuracy and level of abstractness. Patients with FLE, but not TLE, were impaired relative to controls in their overall interpretation of proverbs. However, a subgroup analysis revealed that only patients with left FLE showed impaired interpretation accuracy relative to the other groups, whereas patients with both left FLE and left TLE showed impaired abstraction. Patients with FLE were also impaired when they were asked to select the best interpretation of the proverb from response alternatives. In patients with FLE, only a left-sided seizure focus was associated with poorer performance. In patients with TLE, both an early age of onset and a left-sided seizure focus predicted poorer performance. Overall, FLE patients exhibit greater impairment than TLE patients in interpreting proverbs. However, the nature and disease-specific correlates of impaired performances in proverb interpretation differ between the groups.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Componential Analysis of Proverb Interpretation in Patients with Frontal Lobe Epilepsy and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Relationships with Disease-Related Factors

McDonald

Delis

Kramer

et al. 2008

The Clinical Neuropsychologist

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“…Some recent research has indicated that RH processes may be more important for understanding very unfamiliar and more complex metaphors (Bottini et al, 2007;Mashal et al, 2005;Schmidt, DeBuse, & Seger, 2007). It is also possible that greater RH involvement would occur with pictorial stimuli (Rinaldi, Marangolo, & Baldassarri, 2004;Winner & Gardner, 1977), with other Wgurative forms (Coulson & Williams, 2005;Kempler et al, 1999;Van Lancker, 1990), and in more naturalistic discourse situations involving higher-level inferences and pragmatic processing (Brownell, Gardner, Prather, & Martino, 1995;Sabbagh, 1999). Regardless of these limitations, the main strength of the present investigation involved the systematic study of normal participants with a large, carefully designed, and normed set of stimuli using the same basic paradigm.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding metaphors: Is the right hemisphere uniquely involved?

Kacinik

Chiarello

2007

Brain and Language

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Two divided visual Weld priming experiments examined cerebral asymmetries for understanding metaphors varying in sentence constraint. Experiment 1 investigated ambiguous words (e.g., SWEET and BRIGHT) with literal and metaphoric meanings in ambiguous and unambiguous sentence contexts, while Experiment 2 involved standard metaphors (e.g., The drink you gave me was a meteor) with sententially consistent and inconsistent targets (i.e., POTENT vs COMET). Similar literal and metaphor priming eVects were found in both visual Welds across most experimental conditions. However, RH processes also maintained activation of sententially inconsistent literal meanings following metaphoric expressions. These results do not strongly support the RH as the preferred substrate for metaphor comprehension (e.g., Anaki, Faust, & Kravetz, 1998;Bottini et al., 1994), and suggest that processes in both hemispheres can support metaphor comprehension, although not via identical mechanisms. The LH may utilize sentence constraint to select and integrate only contextually relevant literal and metaphoric meanings, whereas the RH may be less sensitive to sentence context and can maintain the activation of some alternative interpretations. This may be potentially useful in situations where an initial understanding must be revised.

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“…Further clinical investigations (e.g. Brownell et al, 1984Brownell et al, , 1990Kempler et al, 1999;Champagne et al, 2004;Rinaldi et al, 2004) confirmed the presence of a defect of metaphorical language in RBD patients, and other authors (e.g. Tompkins, 1990;Tompkins et al, 1992;Giora et al, 2000;Gagnon et al, 2003;Klepousniotou and Baum, 2005;Papagno et al, 2006) found metaphorical language to be equally impaired after RH or LH injury, thus failing to support the hypothesis of a specific contribution of the RH to the processing of metaphorical meaning of words.…”

Section: The Right Hemisphere Metaphorical Language Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 76%

“…For instance, in some of these studies (e.g. Champagne et al, 2004 andRinaldi et al, 2004) only RBD patients and normal controls were tested, and many of them failed to consider the task difficulty effect in the statistical analysis. The observation that RBD patients are often able to explain verbally what a metaphor means (Winner and Gardner, 1977) made it possible to predict an interaction between groups (RBD vs LBD patients) and task (pictorial vs verbal metaphor comprehension).…”

Section: The Right Hemisphere Metaphorical Language Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Lower- and higher-level models of right hemisphere language. A selective survey

Gainotti¹

2016

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SummaryThe models advanced to explain right hemisphere (RH) language function can be divided into two main types. According to the older (lower-level) models, RH language reflects the ontogenesis of conceptual and semantic-lexical development; the more recent models, on the other hand, suggest that the RH plays an important role in the use of higher-level language functions, such as metaphors, to convey complex, abstract concepts. The hypothesis that the RH may be preferentially involved in processing the semantic-lexical components of language was advanced by Zaidel in splitbrain patients and his model was confirmed by neuropsychological investigations, proving that right brain-damaged patients show selective semanticlexical disorders. The possible links between lower and higher levels of RH language are discussed, as is the hypothesis that the RH may have privileged access to the figurative aspects of novel metaphorical expressions, whereas conventionalization of metaphorical meaning could be a bilaterally-mediated process involving abstract semantic-lexical codes.KEY WORDS: semantic representations, metaphorical language, right hemisphere language, verbal conceptual knowledge, pictorial conceptual knowledge.

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Metaphor Comprehension in Right Brain-Damaged Patients with Visuo-Verbal and Verbal Material: A Dissociation (RE)Considered

Cited by 70 publications

References 19 publications

A Componential Analysis of Proverb Interpretation in Patients with Frontal Lobe Epilepsy and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Relationships with Disease-Related Factors

A Componential Analysis of Proverb Interpretation in Patients with Frontal Lobe Epilepsy and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: Relationships with Disease-Related Factors

Understanding metaphors: Is the right hemisphere uniquely involved?

Lower- and higher-level models of right hemisphere language. A selective survey

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