Cerebral asymmetries in sentence priming and the influence of semantic anomaly

Prior studies (Faust, 1998) indicate that the left (LH) and right (RH) hemi spheres are differentially sensitive to lexical- and sentence-level meaning constraints: lexical priming is augmented by sentence-level facilitation f or words presented to the right visual field (RVF)/LH, but not the left vis ual field (LVF)/RH. This implies that the RH alone should obtain priming fr om anomalous sentences that contain a word strongly associated to the targe t. This was tested by lateralizing the sentence-final target word following three types of sentences: neutral, anomalous, or normal. Half of the nonne utral sentences included an associated word, and half included an unrelated control word. Priming was obtained bilaterally, but was differentially aff ected in each VF depending on sentence-level congruity. (C) 1999 Academic P ress.