Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Right hemisphere language functions and schizophrenia: the forgotten hemisphere?

Mitchell, R.; Crow, T.J.

Authors

R. Mitchell

T.J. Crow



Abstract

This review highlights the importance of right hemisphere language functions for successful social communication and advances the hypothesis that the core deficit in psychosis is a failure of segregation of right from left hemisphere functions. Lesion studies of stroke patients and dichotic listening and functional imaging studies of healthy people have shown that some language functions are mediated by the right hemisphere rather than the left. These functions include discourse planning/comprehension, understanding humour, sarcasm, metaphors and indirect requests, and the generation/comprehension of emotional prosody. Behavioural evidence indicates that patients with typical schizophrenic illnesses perform poorly on tests of these functions, and aspects of these functions are disturbed in schizo-affective and affective psychoses. The higher order language functions mediated by the right hemisphere are essential to an accurate understanding of someone's communicative intent, and the deficits displayed by patients with schizophrenia may make a significant contribution to their social interaction deficits. We outline a bi-hemispheric theory of the neural basis of language that emphasizes the role of the sapiens-specific cerebral torque in determining the four-chambered nature of the human brain in relation to the origins of language and the symptoms of schizophrenia. Future studies of abnormal lateralization of left hemisphere language functions need to take account of the consequences of a failure of lateralization of language functions to the right as well as the left hemisphere.

Citation

Mitchell, R., & Crow, T. (2005). Right hemisphere language functions and schizophrenia: the forgotten hemisphere?. Brain, 128(5), 963-978. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awh466

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date May 1, 2005
Deposit Date Sep 21, 2007
Journal Brain
Print ISSN 0006-8950
Electronic ISSN 1460-2156
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 128
Issue 5
Pages 963-978
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awh466