title: Lateralization in the visual perception of Chinese characters and words.
abstract: It has been reported that tachistoscopic perception of single Chinese characters is better with a left-visual-field (LVF) than with a right-visual-field (RVF) presentation and that of Chinese words consisting of characters is better with a RVF presentation (O. J. L. Tzeng, D. L. Hung, B. Cotton, & S.-Y. Wang, 1979, Nature (London), 382, 499-501). In this study, the nature of this character-word difference in lateralization was explored in a task in which stimuli were presented unilaterally to a visual field for recognition test. Four types of stimuli were used: Single character, single pseudo- or noncharacter, two-character word, and two-character pseudoword. Results show (a) no visual-field advantage for illegal characters and words, (b) a LVF-advantage effect for characters associated with a more prominent LVF than RVF character-superiority effect, (c) a RVF-advantage effect for words associated with a more prominent RVF than LVF word-superiority effect, and (d) these two visual-field effects for characters and words being not absolute, they occur only with a low rather than with a high recognition for their respective illegal counterparts. These results suggest that the character-word difference is due to a more efficient lexical interpretation of character stimuli in the right than in the left hemisphere and a more efficient lexical interpretation of word stimuli in the left than in the right hemisphere.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Republic of China.
authors.forename: C M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.forename: M J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Yang
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002681:China; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading