Social context and humor comprehension in patients with right hemisphere damage
Type de matériel :
87
Patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD) display subtle language and communication disorders, particularly at the level of discourse. Discourse comprehension requires inferences that extend beyond the literal meaning of sentences, as is the case of verbal humor. The aim of this study was to test the possibility of improving understanding of verbal jokes in patients with RHD by providing information about the speaker. Twelve patients with RHD (including five women) aged 40 to 69 years (M = 57.4 ± 7.8) and 12 healthy participants were recruited. Participants performed semantic judgment on sentence pairs. Each pair consisted of an experimental sentence (literal or humorous) and a probe sentence that could be either congruent or incongruent with the first sentence. Sentence pairs were preceded by a structured or neutral social context (known or unknown characters). The results showed a significant improvement in the understanding of humor (reduced error rate) in the structured compared to the neutral condition in the group of RHD patients. Thus, the humor comprehension deficits displayed by these patients can be compensated through the structuring of the social context. These results open up promising paths for the remediation of language and communication disorders associated with damage of the right hemisphere.
Réseaux sociaux