LEXICAL REPRESENTATION AND MORPHOSYNTACTIC PARALLELISM IN THE LEFT-HEMISPHERE

This experiment investigated the sensitivity of the left and right cerebral hemispheres to morphologically ambiguous verbs (i.e., chased) and to morphologically unambiguous verbs (i.e., stolen) in a divided visual-field paradigm with normal subjects. Lexical decisions made to the ambiguous verbs were faster than those to the unambiguous verbs only when presented in the right visual field. The results suggest that the traditional notion of left-hemispheric specialization for syntactic processing can be extended to the retrieval of lower-level morphological representations. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.