Task effect and EEG alpha asymmetry: an analysis of linguistic processing in two response modes.
EEG alpha asymmetry was monitored while subjects listened to two sets of identical stimulus sentences in two tasks. One task was immediate verbal imitation of the stimulus sentence and the other task was modeling and involved the subjects constructing some novel sentences after all stimulus sentences were heard. The results demonstrated that the left hemisphere was significantly more activated while subjects listened to sentences that were to be immediately imitated. These findings suggest that tasks involving remediate verbal reports of stimuli may activate the left hemisphere for motor programming purposes and possibly effect alpha asymmetry. Studies attempting to investigate stimulus effects of hemispheric processing should consider the possibility that tasks involving motoric programming may interact with the stimuli and produce different asymmetry patterns.
D000328:Adult; D000513:Alpha Rhythm; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception