Semantic-pragmatic disorder: a right hemisphere syndrome?

Following right hemisphere lesions, adults' speech can become copious and inappropriate, with abnormal prosody, and they may be unable to comprehend metaphor or humour. Their symptoms resemble those of children with semantic-pragmatic language disorder, who use fluent, grammatically complex language, but with poor sensitivity to the communicative situation. The hyperlexia found in some of these children reflects an underlying cognitive problem in integrating semantic information with knowledge of the world. Both groups of patients fail comprehend inferential meaning or to make use of paralinguistic features. It is hypothesised that the disorders of communication and cognition found in semantic-pragmatic language disorder may be linked to right hemisphere dysfunction, but this has yet to be confirmed by research.