Lexico-semantic deficits in people with right hemisphere damage: Evidence from convergent naming tasks

The right hemisphere (RH) continues to attract considerable scientific attention on its word processing skills. Despite extensive research in this direction, consensus on this issue is lacking. In this context, the present study explored the influence of right hemisphere damage (RHD) on word retrieval (i.e., oral naming) tasks. We administered a battery of 10 convergent naming tasks on a group of 22 right-handed persons with RHD as well as on an equal number of neurotypical age-, gender-, handedness-, and literacy-matched (i.e., control) participants. The comparison of accuracy scores and errors obtained from the two groups revealed significantly poorer performance in the RHD group except on one task (i.e., definition-naming). Additionally, analysis of errors revealed a preponderance of semantic errors. These findings support the role of the right hemisphere in word processing.