Idiosyncratic word associations following right hemisphere damage

Abstract

Single oral word associations produced by right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) stroke patients and age-matched healthy controls were analyzed to assess the right-hemisphere contribution to lexical-semantic processes. RHD patients did not differ from normals in terms of response times, in syntactic class of the response word, or in numbers of errors in response to words drawn from different grammatical categories and words differing in imageability/ concreteness. Groups also did not differ in the number of high frequency, popular, associations produced. Despite their apparently intact ability to access high-frequency lexical associates, RHD patients, particularly those with frontal-lobe lesions, also sporadically produced lexical responses that were idiosyncratically related or that were totally unrelated to the stimulus word. An attentional disorder is suggested to explain these pragmatically deviant lexical associations.