Communication processing in adults evaluated by the Brazilian Protocole MEC - Bateria MAC

Right-brain-damaged individuals may present discursive, pragmatic, lexical-semantic and/or prosod- ic disorders. Objective: To verify the effect of right hemisphere damage on communication processing evaluated by the Brazilian version of the Protocole Montreal d'Evaluation de la Communication (Montreal Communication Evaluation Battery) - Bateria Montreal de Avaliacao da Comunicacao, Bateria MAC, in Portuguese. Methods: A clinical group of 29 right-brain-damaged participants and a control group of 58 non-brain-damaged adults formed the sample. A questionnaire on sociocultural and health aspects, together with the Brazilian MAC Bat- tery was administered. Results: Signifi cant differences between the clinical and control groups were observed in the following MAC Battery tasks: conversational discourse, unconstrained, semantic and orthographic verbal fl uency, linguistic prosody repetition, emotional prosody comprehension, repetition and production. Moreover, the clinical group was less homogeneous than the control group. Conclusions: A right-brain-damage effect was identifi ed directly, on three communication processes: discursive, lexical-semantic and prosodic processes, and