LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE AND RIGHT-HEMISPHERE TASKS - THE EFFECTS OF SCANNING HABITS AND MULTILINGUALISM

This study explores the effects of multilingualism and reading scannin g habits on right hemisphere (RK) abilities. Native Hebrew speakers an d Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals performed three tasks. Experiment 1 employe d an odd/even decision paradigm on lateralized displays of bar graphs. Both groups of subjects displayed the expected LVFA within the range previously reported for readers of English. Experiment 2 consisted of a chair identification task designed to tap asymmetry of hemispheric a rousal and a chimeric face task designed to tap RH specialization for facial emotion. Neither scanning habits nor language experience affect ed performance on the chair task. Scanning habits seem to have affecte d performance on the chimeric faces task: there was no preference for the left smile in these right-to-left readers, as opposed to previous results in the literature using left-to-right readers. Correlations be tween measures from the three tasks and all the subject's scores on an English proficiency test and an a Hebrew test for the bilinguals reve al tentative relationships between proficiency in a second language an d RH abilities. The results do not support the hypothesis that multili ngualism can affect the manner in which these nonlanguage tasks are su bserved by the RH. They do support the hypothesis that scanning habits particular to specific languages can affect performance asymmetries o n some nonlanguage tasks that have been posited to reflect RH speciali zation. (C) 1997 Academic Press.