Alterations in resolution of linguistic ambiguity after cerebral injury in man.

The present experiment examined the ability of subjects with penetrating brain injuries to resolve different forms of linguistic ambiguity. Most subjects with penetrating head wounds of the left cerebral hemisphere (n = 11) had impaired ability to detect linguistic ambiguity even when tested 20 yr. after injury. This decrement in performance was present for all types of ambiguity and was most pronounced in subjects who were dysphasic post-injury (n = 7). A similar pattern was shown by patients with bilateral cortical penetration (n = 11), especially those who were dysarthric or dysphasic (n = 5) immediately after injury. Performance on phonetic and underlying constituent structure ambiguities was more severely affected than performance on lexical, derived constituent structure, and particle-preposition ambiguities. By contrast, patients with right-penetrating cortical lesions (n = 18) performed nearly as well as the normal control subjects (n = 12).