Hemispheric specialization or reading habits: evidence from lexical decision research with Hebrew words and sentences

This paper reports the results of a lexical decision-visual hemifield protocol using Hebrew words and nonwords. The lexical decision task was combined with sentence priming to examine the impact of hemispheric specialization and sentence length. The data are relevant to the Kirsner and Schwartz (1986) hypothesis that reading habits can explain the oft-reported right visual field (RVF) superiority in linguistic tasks. Both the target stimuli and the sentence primes were in Hebrew and 26 male right-handed native Hebrew speakers served as subjects. Hebrew is written and read from right to left. Therefore, according to the favorable foveal viewing explanation (Kirsner & Schwartz, 1986), there should have been no RVF superiority. The results indicated, however, highly significant RVF superiority. Furthermore, priming sentences, written in Hebrew, should direct the attention of the subject to the left visual field in expectation of the appearance of a target word. Nevertheless, the RVF superiority was even more significant when target stimuli were preceded by priming sentences. Both results indicated that reading habits and directed reading attention cannot explain RVF superiority in lexical decision.