Neuropsychological Evidence for Linguistic and Extralinguistic Paths in Communication

Aim of the present study is the validation of a series of predictions concerning the ability to comprehend different pragmatic phenomena expressed through linguistic or gestural means. According to the Cognitive Pragmatics Theory, it exists a gradation of difficulty in the comprehension of different pragmatic phenomena, depending upon the complexity of the mental representations involved; furthermore, the construction of the meaning of a communicative act is relatively independent by the input modality. Thus, we predict that the same gradient of difficulty in the comprehension of different pragmatic phenomena should be detected in both the linguistic and the extralinguistic communication. As right hemisphere injured patients are well known for having pragmatic deficit, also when tested through extralinguistic communication, we aim at comparing their performance on linguistic versus extralinguistic pragmatic ability. An experiment conducted with 11 healthy individuals and 11 right hemisphere damaged patients, tested on two experimental protocols designed to investigate the same sorts of pragmatic phenomena, confirmed