Blackwell Reference Online

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While the study of pragmatics has a long tradition in philosophy and linguistics, its incorporation into the neuroscience of language is relatively recent. The observation that some patients with damage to the right hemisphere (RHD) do not show any obvious impairments in producing or comprehending words or sentences, but nevertheless exhibit communication problems, led to the incorporation of pragmatic theories into neurolinguistic research (for a summary see Paradis, 1998; Stemmer, 1999b). This research has mainly been concerned with providing detailed descriptive accounts of communicative difficulties, first in patients with RHD, and subsequently in other clinical populations such as in patients with autistic, schizophrenic, or developmental disorders and with dementia. Attempts have been made to investigate and explain the processes leading to such impairments. In doing so, questions naturally evolved regarding the role of the brain in the comprehension and production of pragmatic behavior, along with an interest in the neural substrates of cerebral involvement. This research has become known as neuropragmatics. Traditionally, insights have been gained from studies with patients who have sustained some sort of brain damage and, more recently, from studies of both healthy individuals and patients with brain lesions that use such neuroimaging techniques as PET, fMRI or EEG/ERP.The ... log in or subscribe to read full text