The effect of time course and context on the facilitation of semantic features in the cerebral hemispheres

Two divided visual field priming experiments were designed to determine the nature of lexical retrieval in the cerebral hemispheres by studying the fa cilitation of semantic features of unambiguous nouns. Unambiguous nouns hav e a single meaning, yet semantic features associated with these nouns may v ary in the degree to which they are compatible with this single meaning (e. g., LAMB-WOOL as compared with LAMB-CHOPS). Results suggest that the left h emisphere selects both strongly and weakly associated semantic features tha t are compatible with the dominant representation of the noun. Dominance co mpatibility, rather than association strength, seems to be the more importa nt factor for deciding what features are maintained in the left hemisphere. In contrast, the right hemisphere maintains more varied information, inclu ding features that are less compatible with the dominant representation (Ex periment 1) and context information (Experiment 2).