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Updated: Jul 18, 2025

Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Processes in Visual Word Recognition using Electrophysiology
Published on: June 29, 2021
Overestimation of Phonological Judgments on the Right Side of Space
Patrizia Turriziani1,2, Alessia Santostefano1,2, Angela Catania2,3
1Department of Psychology, Educational Science and Human Movement, University of Palermo, 90128 Palermo, Italy.
Abstract:
Spatial attentional biases can be observed during the processing of linguistic material. For example, we previously reported that healthy subjects overestimate the semantic distance between word stimuli in the right vs. left space. Here, we explored whether or not attentional biases are also observed in tasks requiring an evaluation of phonological distance between words in the right and left hemifield. Forty-one healthy subjects were presented with triplets of words arranged in space and were asked to indicate the side of the space in which the phonological distance between the middle word and an outer word was smaller. In Experiment 1, real words and pseudowords were used, while in Experiment 2, only pseudowords and consonant strings were used. Subjects overestimated the phonological distance between the middle and outer words in the right space. These findings were specific to word stimuli. These results are consistent with the idea that semantic and phonological information may be internally mapped onto spatial representations.
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