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Hemisphere-specific effects in word recognition do not require hemisphere-specific modes of access
1Department of Computer Science, Neural and Cognitive Sciences Program, University of Maryland, A.V. Williams Building, Room 4129, College Park, MD 20742, USA. cwhitney@cs.umd.edu
Brain and Language
|February 18, 2004
Summary
Information is initially split between brain hemispheres. The SERIOL model explains how letter order is integrated, reconciling hemisphere-specific effects in lexical access with a unified representation.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Foveal visual information is initially processed by both cerebral hemispheres.
- The SERIOL model explains letter-position coding via abstract bigram representations.
- Hemisphere-specific effects in lexical access are observed with unilateral stimuli.
Purpose of the Study:
- To present the SERIOL model of letter-position coding.
- To explain how visual information is integrated across hemispheres.
- To reconcile hemisphere-independent lexical access with hemisphere-specific effects.
Main Methods:
- Theoretical modeling of letter-position coding.
- Analysis of hemisphere-specific transformations for bigram representation.
- Theoretical account for lexical neighborhood size (N) effects.
Main Results:
- The SERIOL model integrates letter strings into an abstract bigram representation.
- Hemisphere-specific transformations are proposed to explain observed effects.
- A theoretical account for right hemisphere (RH) facilitation with high N is provided.
Conclusions:
- The SERIOL model offers a unified account of letter-position coding.
- Hemisphere-specific effects in lexical access arise from processing transformations.
- The model explains differing effects of word length across visual fields.