Journal
BRAIN RESEARCH
Volume 1153, Issue -, Pages 144-157Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2007.03.046
Keywords
cerebral hemispheres; word processing; semantic priming; summation priming; coarse coding hypothesis; lexical ambiguity
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Funding
- NIA NIH HHS [R01 AG026308-03, R01 AG026308-04, R01 AG026308-05, R01 AG026308-01A1, AG026308, R01 AG026308, R01 AG026308-02] Funding Source: Medline
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The coarse coding hypothesis postulates that the cerebral hemispheres differ in their breadth of semantic activation, with the left hemisphere activating a narrow, focused semantic field and the right weakly activating a broader semantic field. In support of coarse coding, studies investigating priming for multiple senses of a lexically ambiguous word have reported a right hemisphere benefit. However, studies of mediated priming have failed to find a right hemisphere advantage I-or processing distantly linked, unambiguous words. To address this debate, the present study made use of a multiple priming paradigm in which two primes either converged onto the single meaning of an unambiguous, lexically associated target (LION-STRIPES-TIGER) or diverged onto different meanings of an ambiguous target (KIDNEY-PIANO-ORGAN). In two experiments, participants either made lexical decisions to lateralized targets (Experiment 1) or made a semantic relatedness judgment between primes and targets (Experiment 2). in both tasks, for both ambiguous and unambiguous triplets we found equivalent priming strengths and patterns across the two visual fields, counter to the predictions of the coarse coding hypothesis. Priming patterns further suggested that both hemispheres made use of lexical level representations in the lexical decision task and semantic representations in the semantic judgment task. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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