Sentence priming effects in the two cerebral hemispheres: influences of lexical relatedness, word order, and sentence anomaly

Abstract

The present study examined lexical, syntactic and semantic message-level contributions to sentence priming in the left (LH) and right (RH) hemispheres. Participants made lexical decisions to laterally presented target words preceded by congruent, incongruent, syntactic, random and neutral incomplete sentences that either contained or did not contain a lexical associate of the target. In the LH, congruent associated sentences facilitated, and incongruent associated sentences inhibited, target word recognition extensively. A similar pattern, but attenuated, was found for the RH. In both the LH and RH, random associated sentences benefited word target recognition very moderately. Syntactic associated sentence primes that contain word-level information embedded in a meaningless message provided the condition in which the RH was benefited but the LH was not. The asymmetry of sentence type context effects in the LH and RH suggests some important differences in message-level processes available to each hemisphere.