Impaired performance of right-brain-damaged patients on a sentence anagram task

A sentence anagram task was used to examine the right cerebral hemispheres’s role in core grammatical functioning at the syntactic level. The test consisted of two subsets of stimuli involving empty categories: (a) those that required the empty category to be filled, and (b) those that allowed the category to remain empty. Three hypotheses were presented: (1) right-brain-damaged patients (RBDs) would be more sensitive to subset (a) than (b), (2) RBDs would perform similarly to left-brain-damaged subjects, and (3) non-brain-damaged controls would outerperform both brain-damaged groups. With all hypotheses supported, the discussion focuses on an explanation for RBDs’ sensitivity to the first subset of stimuli.