The right cerebral hemisphere will never take center stage in the study
of neurological, cognitive, and psycholinguistic underpinnings of adult
language comprehension. But the right hemisphere is increasingly being
recognized as more than a minor actor in the comprehension arena.

The primary goal of my research program has been to advance
theory-building about the nature of language comprehension and social
interaction deficits in adults who incur unilateral right hemisphere
brain damage (RHD). Such evidence also provides a crucial window on the
nature of language representation and processing in the intact right
hemisphere (RH).

In this talk I will discuss the state of theory and evidence about RHD
deficits in (and RH contributions to) language comprehension, focusing
on three areas of research interest: modulation of lexical-semantic
activation; processing of higher level nonliteral/inferential language;
and reasoning from a Theory of Mind. I will also outline limitations in
much of the extant evidence that result from key methodological choices.
These include an over-reliance on explicit, post-comprehension measures
of performance; a dearth of attention to performance variations
associated with variations in attentional/task processing load; and the
near absence of investigation of performance variations in relation to
within-hemisphere lesion site.