Evidence for hemispheric specialization of lexical distinctions in bilingual Chinese-Mandarin speakers

Lexical decision vocal reaction times of a group of English-proficient, Chinese-Mandarin speakers and group of monolingual, English speakers were measured to unilaterally presented concrete and abstract English words. Results of an ANOVA showed a significant group x visual field x stimulus type interaction. Post-hoc analysis showed a significant right visual field advantage for the Chinese subjects. For the English speaking subjects, right visual field stimulations yielded significantly faster vocal reaction times to the abstract words than to the concrete ones, while the opposite occurred for left visual-field inputs. Also, a correlation between the two lateral conditions was significant for the Chinese subjects but not for the English speakers. These findings suggest that the English speakers evidenced dissociated left and right hemispheric linguistic processing while the Chinese subjects left hemisphere was responsible for the final phonological stages of linguistic analysis. Such findings support a phonological "monitor-user" hypothesis for cerebral dominance characteristics in bilingual Chinese speakers.