ABSTRACT
The qualitatively parallel participation hypothesis predicts that a lesion in the right hemisphere will affect all aspects of the utterance, whereas the qualitatively selective participation hypothesis predicts that a right-hemisphere lesion will affect certain aspects of the utterance. The redundant and the quantitatively complementary participation hypotheses assume an identical processing of the same aspects of an utterance; the qualitatively parallel participation hypothesis assumes a different processing of the same aspects while the qualitatively selective participation hypothesis assumes a different processing of different aspects. Subsequent to right-hemisphere lesions bilinguals may be expected, as unilinguals, to exhibit impairment of affective prosody, of the ability to handle humor, sarcasm, irony, inference, analogy, nonexplicit speech acts, and, in general, any nonliteral meaning. The Loch Ness Monster approach is doomed to failure, however well designed the study may be in all other respects. It is like attempting to treat a dead patient with the most efficacious medication available in the most technically advanced facility.
