Linguistic processes in the two cerebral hemispheres: implications for modularity vs interactionism

Three experiments are reported on lexical decision to target stimuli presented to the right or left visual field (RVF, LVF) following a variety of priming stimuli, words, incomplete sentences, and scrambled sentences. Lexical decision performance is always superior for stimuli presented to the RVF. Primes always facilitate the discrimination of words from nonword target stimuli presented to either visual field. However, when the prime is a sentence which is completed syntactically and semantically by a target word (normal, congruent sentence), the facilitation for RVF presented targets is significantly greater than for LVF targets. When the prime is either: (1) a single word, (2) a nonstructured (scrambled) sentence, or (3) a noncongruent-related sentence, the difference in facilitation between RVF and LVF presented targets is much smaller. These data are discussed with respect to (1) the nature of priming by sentences versus words, (2) language processing by the two hemispheres, and (3) modularity versus interactionism in language processing.