Asymmetry in hemispheric strategies for visual recognition of homonyms

ABSTRACT

The primary objective of this investigation was to explore the strategic asymmetry exhibited by the two hemispheres during semantic processing, specifically focusing on the visual recognition of homonyms. By utilizing balanced and unbalanced homonyms, we sought to ascertain whether foveal processing adheres to a specific hemisphere's strategy. In Experiment 1, we employed a visual half-field presentation paradigm to elucidate the unihemispheric strategy employed for homonym recognition. Notably, our results revealed a significant type effect, whereby responses were more accurate for unbalanced homonyms compared to balanced homonyms, particularly in the LVF/RH. This outcome suggests that the RH exhibits a stronger activation of the dominant meaning, primarily driven by frequency, while the LH concurrently activates all candidate meanings of homonyms with comparable intensity. Building upon these insights, Experiment 2 involved the presentation of both homonym types within the foveal vision, leading to the identification of a significant type effect and providing evidence for the robust utilization of the RH strategy during foveal homonym recognition. Collectively, these findings delineate an asymmetric strategy employed during semantic processing across the hemispheres, with the RH assuming a dominant role in the semantic processing of foveal words.

KEYWORDS:

• Homonym
• semantic processing
• visual word recognition
• interhemispheric interaction
• visual half-field study

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the participants in the present study as they had no problems with the experimental procedures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The collected and analyzed data in the present study are available after permission of the authors in case of acceptable requests.

Institutional Review Board Statement

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Korea University (KUIRB-2021-0427-01).

Notes

1 The frequencies of each meaning in homonyms were extracted from Korean Sejong National Corpus (Lee & Nam, 2020). The number of words that shared each meaning in homonyms was counted to obtain the mean frequency value and standard error of frequencies, which are presented according to the experimental conditions in Table 1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5B5A16049384).