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Right hemisphere capacity for language: A scoping review of lesion studies

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Venu Balasubramanian^1,2 (), Brittany Hague^1,2, Reagan Bonforte^1,2, Charlotte Lavander^1,2; ¹Seton Hall University, ²Communication Neuroscience & Aphasia Research Lab

Background. The work of Jackson (1874, 1915) on the duality of human brain did not generate serious responses, but a few decades later, numerous studies addressed the issue of right hemisphere’s language capacity (RHLC). The objectives of the current study include: What are the emerging trends in research? Are there distinctive sites of lesions and unique set of language characteristics associated with (RHD) syndrome and ‘Crossed aphasia’ (CA)? Were there any methodological innovations in the study of syntactic processing capacity of RH? What does language recovery reveal about the role of RH? Does RH contribute to reading and writing? Method. Scoping review of research published during 2000-2025. Several sources of data were used (PubMed, PsycINFO). Search terms used: RH damage and language, & language laterality. Results. A total of 250 articles were selected. Several emerging trends/topics of research were identified: Discourse production and comprehension (Blake, 2006), Prosodic production and comprehension (de Beer et al, 2023), Pragmatic deficits (Minga et al, 2020), Lexical semantics (Thompson et al, 2016), and Crossed aphasia (Takahashi et al, 2024). More importantly, our study found the use of morpho-syntactic processing as a tool to identify the status of syntax in RHD (Martzoukou et al, 2025). The contribution of RHLC to reading was recognized (Taylor et al, 2003). Individual differences in learning and relearning of language were accounted by RHLC. (Pratt et al, 2023). The conceptual issues related to RHD syndrome and CA will be discussed in terms of a comparison of lesion localization and language characteristics.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other