Cerebral asymmetry for aspects of sentence processing

Abstract

Ordinarily, the right ear/left hemisphere does better than the left ear/right hemisphere at tasks involving linguistic stimuli. It was reasoned that if the right ear/left hemisphere is more efficient than the left ear/right hemisphere at extracting the meaning of a sentence, then, right after the sentence is heard, information presented to the right ear may be more difficult to retrieve verbatim than information presented to the left ear. This is because the channel that is nonprivileged for meaning (the left ear) might contain the raw verbatim input longer than the privileged channel. This idea was tested with a modified Sternberg item‐recognition task, and it was found that sentences presented to the right ear did produce a longer recognition latency than sentences presented to the left ear. The faster left ear response occurred with both a manual and a spoken response. The results were interpreted as support for greater “depth of processing” by the right ear/dominant hemisphere than the left ear/minor hemisphere. That is, the left hemisphere may he more adept than the right hemisphere at certain aspects of linguistic analysis, namely, semantic analysis. Conversely, it appears that the right hemisphere is more adept than the left hemisphere at recognizing the presence of a word in a sentence just heard.