Orthographic and phonological priming in the two cerebral hemispheres

Abstract

The patterns of activation invoked in the two cerebral hemispheres by written words may be different. Two lexical decision experiments investigated several aspects of such activation patterns. Experiment 1 tested phonological and orthographic priming in the hemispheres, manipulating two levels of phonological and two levels of orthographic similarity. Orthographic priming in the left visual field (LVF) was significantly larger than in the right visual field (RVF). In Experiment 2, primes were phonologically identical to the targets (homophones) but differed in their orthographic similarity. For LVF targets, only orthographic priming was significant, whereas for RVF targets, the phonological primes were effective regardless of their orthographic similarity. The results imply that orthographic activation, though maintained by both hemispheres, is more characteristic of right hemisphere word recognition processes, whereas phonological priming is more characteristic of left hemisphere processes.