Tompkins C A, Boada R, McGarry K
Department of Communication, University of Pittsburgh.
J Speech Hear Res. 1992 Jun;35(3):626-37. doi: 10.1044/jshr.3503.626.
Idiom interpretation tasks are routinely used in the clinical evaluation of adults with brain damage, and idiom processing has received increasing attention in the psycholinguistic literature. Clinical evidence suggests that adults with unilateral right-hemisphere damage (RHD) are insensitive to nonliteral meanings conveyed by idiomatic expressions and other figurative forms. However, this portrayal is derived from their terminal responses to tasks that reflect multiple aspects of mental operations (off-line measures), obscuring the source of poor performance. This study used an on-line word-monitoring task to assess RHD, left-hemisphere-damaged, and normally aging adults' implicit knowledge of familiar idiomatic expressions. Brain-damaged subjects performed similarly to normal controls on this task, even though the clinical subjects fared poorly by comparison on an off-line idiom definition measure. These results suggest that adults with unilateral brain damage can activate and retrieve familiar idiomatic forms, and that their idiom-interpretation deficits most likely reflect impairment at some later stage of information processing. Further, error analysis of idiom-definition performance did not support the customary characterization of RHD adults as excessively literal responders. The paper discusses clinical implications of the nature and use of idiom interpretation tasks.
习语解释任务经常用于对患有脑损伤的成年人进行临床评估，并且习语处理在心理语言学文献中受到越来越多的关注。临床证据表明，患有单侧右半球损伤（RHD）的成年人对习语表达和其他比喻形式所传达的非字面意义不敏感。然而，这种描述源于他们对反映心理操作多个方面的任务的最终反应（离线测量），掩盖了表现不佳的根源。本研究使用在线单词监测任务来评估患有RHD、左半球损伤和正常衰老的成年人对熟悉习语表达的隐性知识。尽管临床受试者在离线习语定义测量中表现较差，但脑损伤受试者在这项任务中的表现与正常对照组相似。这些结果表明，患有单侧脑损伤的成年人能够激活和检索熟悉的习语形式，并且他们的习语解释缺陷很可能反映了信息处理后期某个阶段的损伤。此外，习语定义表现的错误分析并不支持将患有RHD的成年人习惯性地描述为过度拘泥字面意思的回应者。本文讨论了习语解释任务的性质和用途的临床意义。
