SEMANTIC PROCESSING FUNCTIONS OF KANJI AND KANA WORDS IN THE RIGHT-HEMISPHERE

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the semantic processing of words written in Kanji and Kana in the normal right cerebral hemisphere of the brain. The sentence judgement task required subjects to judge whether the laterally presented word written in Kanji or Kana was congruous with the meaning of the sentence which was presented prior to the sentence judgement task. Concrete and abstract words were employed in the experiment. A manual reaction time measure was used to assess the relative efficiency of lateral stimulus-response pathways in processing linguistic information. Results showed that the subjects significantly judged the concrete words written in Kanji or Kana faster than abstract words when they were presented in the left visual field, there were no significant reaction time differences in the judgement of both concrete and abstract words presented in the right visual field. These results were interpreted as supporting the view that the right hemisphere of the brain can play a functional role in processing words to some degree.