| خلاصه مقاله | Background: Speech and language pathologists get referrals of individuals who present with language
and communication problems following to lesion in either the left hemisphere or right hemisphere.
Right hemisphere participates in communication since is better at deciphering emotions expressed by
faces, prosody and understanding macrostructure. Right hemisphere disorder (RHD) is often caused by
cerebrovascular accidents, traumatic brain injuries, brain tumors, or other neurological problems. This
study is aimed to review the effects of RHD on language and interventional issues.
Methods: Published researches were identified by review of scientific databases (PMC, Science Direct,
and Neuroscience, PubMed) using relevant keywords with reviewing the articles from 1990 to 2018
through the search of the resources.
Results: RHD patients can structure sentences and paragraphs according to rules of their language,
they don’t have particular problems in syntax, grammar, phonological awareness and word retrieval,
Their control over linguistic structure has a more general problem with language use like discourse
(sentences organized to convey a meaning) deficits, inability to make inferences, difficulty in
understanding and generating main concepts, problem with alternate meanings, pragmatic deficits,
difficulty in processing emotional content and prosody. When the individual or others are concerned
about the problem, direct treatment should be started which can be restorative or compensatory.
Although there is great variability between patients, studies suggest that three guidelines should be
considered in the treatment protocol. These guidelines include: raising the awareness of deficit,
organizing the tasks into a hierarchy and considering the basic cognitive impairments.
Conclusion: Damage to the right cerebral hemisphere can impair communication ability, even in the
absence of aphasia. Communication deficits associated with right hemisphere injury involve nonliteral
language, speech prosody, discourse, and related cognitive abilities, such as inference and Theory of
Mind. Language difficulties in RHD are more evident during the performance of complex
multidimensional tasks. RHD can have a significant impact on functional performance in social and
vocational settings. It is important to run the treatment by manipulating the difficulty level. |