Another look at categorical priming in the cerebral hemispheres

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of exemplar dominance on semantic priming in the left and right visual fields for words that are members of the same category, but not strongly associated. A low proportion of related primes was employed in lexical decision and word pronunciation tasks to assess the automatic activation of word meanings in each cerebral hemisphere. Priming was reliably obtained only in the LVF/right hemisphere. In addition, this effect did not vary with category dominance of the prime:equivalent LVF priming was observed for ROBIN-CROW (high dominant) and DUCK-CROW (low dominant) pairs. These findings support the view that a broader range of related meanings is activated during word recognition in the right, than in the left, hemisphere.