In the present study, reaction time of oblique and orthogonal saccades was investigated in normal subjects and in two groups of patients with right (RBD) and left (LBD) vascular cerebral lesions and no signs of spatial neglect. Clear altitudinal effects were present in each group of subjects: saccadic latencies were longer in the lower than in the upper part of the visual field for both orthogo...

Recent findings on the communicative functions of the left versus the right hemisphere of the brain may suggest that there is aodistinction between the intentional use of symbols for the sending of specific messages or propositions (language, signing, pantomime) and spontaneous expressive behaviors that signal their meaning through a natural relationship with that which is signified. recent res...

This study explored a voice characteristics in aphasic patients suffering from the damage of the left and right cerebral hemispheres regardless of the aphasia type. A series of acoustic analyses were conducted including fundamental frequency in Hz (Fo), duration of the vowel "a" phonation, jitter and shimmer. A pattern of 20 male aphasic patients was included in the research. At the aphasics wi...

Aphasia (defined as the loss or impairment of language abilities following acquired brain injury) is strongly associated with damage to the left hemisphere in adults. This well-known finding has led to the hypothesis that the left hemisphere is innately specialized for language, and may be the site of a specific "language organ". However, for over a century we have known that young children wit...

We examined the effect of localized brain lesions on processing of the basic speech acts (BSAs) of question, assertion, request, and command. Both left and right cerebral damage produced significant deficits relative to normal controls, and left brain damaged patients performed worse than patients with right-sided lesions. This finding argues against the common conjecture that the right hemisph...

We investigated the implicit, or covert, reading ability of a global alexic patient (EA) to help determine the contribution of the right hemisphere to reading. Previous studies of alexic patients with left hemisphere damage have suggested that the ability to derive meaning from printed words that cannot be read out loud may reflect right hemisphere reading mechanisms. Other investigators have a...

Vocal emblems, such as shh and brr, are speech sounds that have linguistic and nonlinguistic features; thus, it is unclear how they are processed in the brain. Five adult dextral individuals with left-brain damage and moderate-severe Wernicke's aphasia, five adult dextral individuals with right-brain damage, and five Controls participated in two tasks: (1) matching vocal emblems to photographs ...