Abstract

This study examined semantic priming in the left and right hemispheres by utilizing the primed lexical decision task. Normal college students and an anomic patient participated in two experiments. The basic logic of this study is that differences in task performance, if the left hemisphere is responsible for the relevant lexical processing, will exist between anomic and normals because the left hemisphere of the anomic was damaged, while differences in task performance between the two groups, if the right hemisphere involves with semantic processing dominantly, will not be found. In Experiment 1, the priming effect of associative relatedness between Hangul words was investigated and found to coincide with those of previous studies. It was found that words with the associative relatedness exhibited facilitatory priming in both hemispheres. Normals showed a larger effect in the right hemisphere, while the anomic showed a larger effect in the left hemisphere. We suggest that these results of hemispheric differences come from the different linguistic processing between the two groups. In Experiment 2, the priming effect associated with the categorical relatedness was investigated. When the vertical relatedness existed between word pairs, normals showed the greater priming effect in the left hemisphere, while the anomic showed in the opposite manner. However, when the horizontal relatedness was utilized, both groups' showed greater priming effects in the right hemisphere. The priming effect identified in Experiment 1 and 2 herein leads to the conclusion that the processing manner is different for the two hemispheres.