ABSTRACT
Discourse includes the production and comprehension of language in contexts that extend beyond the literal meaning of individual words or sentences. Familiar examples include the humor of a shared joke, the fresh perspective of a novel metaphor, the caustic sting of a sarcastic utterance, and the entertainment value of an engaging story. The heterogeneity of these examples suggests the great array of cognitive and interpersonal skills required for success in this domain. Discourse ability, of course, most often rests on adequate phonological and syntactic analysis, but the required competencies in other domains are more revealing. Discourse comprehension, for example, requires inferences of varying difficulty as a means of establishing connections among elements that may be widely separated in written or oral text. It requires identifying the gist of a passage and understanding how information either fits or does not fit with that main idea. Furthermore, because discourse always entails some form of exchange between people, whether they be speakers, writers, listeners, or readers, the success of the communication requires an appreciation of the thoughts and emotions of other people: what they know and do not know, how they feel, and why people speak and act as they do (e.g., Brown & Levinson, 1987; Clark & Marshall, 1981; Grice, 1975; Rommetveit, 1974; Sperber & Wilson, 1986). Discourse ability is an exciting topic for neuropsychology because it highlights the importance of right hemisphere processing for so many basic cognitive and social abilities.
