mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Right Hemisphere: Language Comprehension & Related Topics Articles not linked can be found at most larger university libraries, or in some cases ordered directly from the journal. Selected articles are also available in the Member's Area . Linked articles may be viewed using Adobe Acrobat Reader (free download). *Right Hemisphere Language Functions and Schizophrenia: The Forgotten Hemisphere?* Mitchell, Rachel L. C. & Crow, Tim J. Brain, 2005 (advanced online version) This review highlights the importance of right hemisphere language functions for successful social communication and advances the hypothesis that the core deficit in psychosis is a failure of segregation of right from left hemisphere functions. Lesion studies of stroke patients and dichotic listening and functional imaging studies of healthy people have shown that some language functions are mediated by the right hemisphere rather than the left. These functions include discourse planning/comprehension, understanding humour, sarcasm, metaphors and indirect requests, and the generation/comprehension of emotional prosody. Behavioural evidence indicates that patients with typical schizophrenic illnesses perform poorly on tests of these functions, and aspects of these functions are disturbed in schizo-affective and affective psychoses. The higher order language functions mediated by the right hemisphere are essential to an accurate understanding of someone's communicative intent, and the deficits displayed by patients with schizophrenia may make a significant contribution to their social interaction deficits. We outline a bi-hemispheric theory of the neural basis of language that emphasizes the role of the sapiens-specific cerebral torque in determining the four-chambered nature of the human brain in relation to the origins of language and the symptoms of schizophrenia. Future studies of abnormal lateralization of left hemisphere language functions need to take account of the consequences of a failure of lateralization of language functions to the right as well as the left hemisphere. *Metaphor and Metacommunication in Schizophrenic Language* Frow, J. Social Semiotics, 2001, 11(3):275-287 Since the beginning of this century, psychiatrists and linguists, assuming a correlation between disordered talk and disordered cognition, have sought to devise language tests with diagnostic efficiency for mental 'illnesses'. Schizophrenia in particular has been assumed to be characterized by disorders of cohesion, of reference, and of symbolization. Much of this work is flawed by its a priori assumptions about the reality of the category of schizophrenia and about the relation between 'normal' (non-figurative, 'logical') and 'deviant' (figurative, 'magical') uses of language, as well as by particular methodological problems such as the failure to control for experimental context and for the effects of psychotropic drugs. Nevertheless, the debates within psychiatry and linguistics over communicative disorders have a good deal to tell us about the 'normal' uses of figurative language in social interaction. In particular, they raise complex questions about the metacommunicative functions of metaphor: How does figuratively coded language work to convey multiple simultaneous and sometimes contradictory messages? What kinds of discursive relations does it thereby establish or maintain or disrupt? How does it contribute to narrative cohesion, and are there tensions between figure and story? On what basis, if any, is it possible to distinguish between 'appropriate' and 'inappropriate' uses of metaphor? *Language Lateralization in Healthy Right-Handers * Knecht, S., Deppe, M., Dräger, B., Bobe, L., Lohmann, H., Ringelstein, E.-B., and Henningsen, H. Brain, January 2000, Vol. 123, No. 1, 74-81 Our knowledge about the variability of cerebral language lateralization is derived from studies of patients with brain lesions and thus possible secondary reorganization of cerebral functions. In healthy right-handed subjects `atypical', i.e. right hemisphere language dominance, has generally been assumed to be exceedingly rare. To test this assumption we measured language lateralization in 188 healthy subjects with moderate and strong right-handedness (59% females) by a new non-invasive, quantitative technique previously validated by direct comparison with the intracarotid amobarbital procedure. During a word generation task the averaged hemispheric perfusion differences within the territories of the middle cerebral arteries were determined. (i) The natural distribution of language lateralization was found to occur along a bimodal continuum. (ii) Lateralization was equivalent in men and women. (iii) Right hemisphere dominance was found in 7.5% of subjects. These findings indicate that atypical language dominance in healthy right-handed subjects of either sex is considerably more common than previously suspected. *The Role of the Right Hemisphere in the Interpretation of Figurative Aspects of Language: A Positron Emission Tomography Activation Study* Bottini, G., Corcoran, R., Sterzi, R., Paulesu, E., Schenone, P., Scarpa, P., Frackowiak, R.S., and Frith, C.D. Brain, 1994, Vol. 117, Issue 6, 1241-1253 We investigated cerebral activity in six normal volunteers using PET to explore the hypothesis that the right hemisphere has a specific role in the interpretation of figurative aspects of language such as metaphors. We also mapped the anatomical structures involved in sentence comprehension. During regional cerebral blood flow measurement subjects were asked to perform three different linguistic tasks: (i) metaphorical comprehension; (ii) literal comprehension of sentences; and (iii) a lexical-decision task. We found that comprehension of sentences compared with the lexical-decision task, induced extensive activation in several regions of the left hemisphere, including the prefrontal and basal frontal cortex, the middle and inferior temporal gyri and temporal pole, the parietal cortex and the precuneus. Comprehension of metaphors was associated with similar activations in the left hemisphere, but in addition, a number of sites were activated in the right hemisphere: the prefrontal cortex, the middle temporal gyrus, the precuneus and the posterior cingulate. We conclude that the interpretation of language involves widespread distributed systems bilaterally with the right hemisphere having a special role in the appreciation of metaphors. Copyright 1998-2005 Julian Jaynes Society Website Design: Montclair Consulting Group