The Investigation of Aging and Brain Damage on Cognitive-Communicative Mind Functions in Discourse Understanding: A Neurolinguistics Study

The purpose of this research is to assess cognitive-communicative abilities in healthy young and elderly individuals, as well as patients with right hemisphere damage (RHD). The nature of this quantitative study’s methodology was casual-comparative. In Persian, 18 RHDs aged 53 to 75 (7 females and 11 males) and 54 healthy individuals aged 30 to 45, 45 to 60, and 60 to 75 who resided in Tehran in 2021 were evaluated. The subjects were selected using a method of convenience sampling. The Selective Attention Test (SAT), the Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS), the Bedside version of Persian WAB (P-WAB-1), the Ironic Process Test (IPT), and the . SPSS version 25 was used to conduct a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the data. On memory, selective attention, semantic judgment, proverb perception, and irony perception tests, the functional difference between RHDs and healthy individuals is statistically significant (P< 0.05)Memory and selective attention evaluations reveal a statistically significant (P<0.05) functional difference between the healthy 60-75-year-olds and the two healthy 30-45 and 45-60-year-old groups. In the ironic process test, the functional difference between the healthy group aged 60-75 and the healthy group aged 45-30 is significant (P<0.05). On the semantic judgment and proverb perception tests (P>0.05), there is no statistically significant difference between the 60-75-year-old healthy group and the 30-45 and 45-60-year-old healthy groups. Cognitive resources hypothesis can explain the poor communicative-cognitive test performance of RHDs compared to healthy individuals and the inferior performance of healthy elderly individuals compared to healthy younger individuals.