Record Detail

Brain damaged participants offer an opportunity to evaluate the cognitive and
linguistic processes and make assumptions about how the brain works. Cognitive linguists
have been investigating the underlying mechanisms of idiom comprehension to unravel the
ongoing debate on hemispheric specialization in figurative language comprehension. The aim
of this study is to evaluate and compare the comprehension of idiomatic expressions in left
brain damaged (LBD) aphasic, right brain damaged (RBD) and healthy control participants.
Idiom comprehension in eleven LBD aphasic participants, ten RBD participants and eleven
healthy control participants were assessed with three tasks: String to Picture Matching Task,
Literal Sentence Comprehension Task and Oral Idiom Definition Task. The results of the
tasks showed that in overall idiom comprehension category, the left brain-damaged aphasic
participants interpret idioms more literally compared to right brain-damaged participants.
What is more, there is a significant difference in opaque idiom comprehension implying that
left brain-damaged aphasic participants perform worse compared to right brain-damaged
participants. On the other hand, there is no statistically significant difference in scores of
transparent idiom comprehension between the left brain-damaged aphasic and right brain-
damaged participants. This result also contribute to the idea that while figurative processing
system is damaged in LBD aphasics, the literal comprehension mechanism is spared to some
extent. The results of this study support the view that idiom comprehension sites are mainly
left lateralized. Furthermore, the results of this study are in consistence with the Giora’s
Graded Salience Hypothesis.