Complementary Right- and Left-Hemisphere Language Comprehension

Beeman, Mark; Chiarello, Christine

doi:10.1111/1467-8721.ep11521805

Cited by 153 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Although findings in the aphasia literature that monolingual patients with left hemisphere lesions regularly show language deficits has long influenced the notion of strong left hemisphere dominance for language, recent research has revealed more input from the right hemisphere during monolingual language processing than was previously expected (see Beeman & Chiarello, 1998;. Nevertheless, language lateralisation in healthy monolinguals has not previously been systematically assessed in the form of a meta-analysis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Existing research on brain lateralisation of language supports the view that the left hemisphere (LH) is dominant for language, particularly for grammatical aspects of language, but that the right hemisphere (RH) also supports language processing, including aspects involved in discourse coherence (e.g., Beeman & Chiarello, 1998;Boatman, 2004). The present research examines whether this generalisation, based largely on the monolingual condition, is equally applicable to users of two or more languages.…”

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Laterality and language experience

Hull

Vaid

2006

Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

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A meta-analysis was conducted on studies that examined hemispheric functional asymmetry for language in brain-intact monolingual and bilingual adults. Data from 23 laterality studies that directly compared bilingual and monolingual speakers on the same language were analysed (n0/ 1234). Variables examined were language experience (monolingual, bilingual), experimental paradigm (dichotic listening, visual hemifield presentation, and dual task) and, among bilinguals, the influence of second language proficiency (proficient vs nonproficient) and onset of bilingualism (early, or before age 6; and late, or after age 6). Overall, monolinguals and late bilinguals showed reliable left hemisphere dominance, while early bilinguals showed reliable bilateral hemispheric involvement. Within bilinguals, there was no reliable effect of language proficiency when age of L2 acquisition was controlled. The findings indicate that early learning of one vs. two languages predicts divergent patterns of cerebral language lateralisation in adulthood.Whereas remarkable progress has been made towards understanding how language is organised in the brain, much of this knowledge has come from studies of single language users and thus does not speak to the situation characterising the majority of the world's language users, who are bilingual or multilingual. Studying the neural concomitants of multiple language experience is important for redressing this gap and, from a broader perspective, to further our understanding of the neurological basis for the capacity for language in its various manifestations.Existing research on brain lateralisation of language supports the view that the left hemisphere (LH) is dominant for language, particularly for grammatical aspects of language, but that the right hemisphere (RH) also supports language processing, including aspects involved in discourse

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 85%

Laterality and language experience

Hull

Vaid

2006

Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

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“…It is tempting to view this in the context of known hemispheric asymmetries in language processing. The specialization for fine-grained language processing in the left hemisphere is abundantly documented, but elementary semantic analysis can take place in the right hemisphere as well (Beeman & Chiarello, 1998). However, ascribing scalp-recorded potentials to activity in specific brain regions is notoriously difficult.…”

Section: Qualitative Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic processing without conscious identification: Evidence from event-related potentials.

Stenberg¹,

Lindgren²,

Johansson³

et al. 2000

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Three event-related potential (ERP) experiments examined whether semantic content can be accessed from visually presented words that cannot be consciously identified. Category labels were shown to participants, followed by masked, briefly exposed words that were either exemplars of the category or not exemplars. The task was to verify the category, by guessing if necessary, and to identify the word, naming it if possible. Exposure durations were selected to allow identification in approximately half the trials. For identified words, there was a marked difference in the ERP response between in-category and out-ofcategory words because of an N400 component. For unidentified words, there was a similar although smaller difference. Conscious identification was defined using a variety of approaches: verbal report, 6-altemative forced choice, and binary categorization (in the context of the regression method; A. G. Greenwald, M. R. Klinger, & E. S. Schuh, 1995). By any definition, ERPs for unidentified words showed evidence of semantic processing. In addition, there were differences in the neuronal populations recruited to process above-threshold versus below-threshold words, suggesting qualitative differences.Perception of stimuli under severely data-limited conditions has been studied throughout the history of experimental psychology, and a number of early studies (reviewed by Adams, 1957) showed that participants performed at levels exceeding chance while expressing very low subjective confidence in their perceptions. The dissociation between a direct measure of aware perception, such as a verbal report, and a different measure, such as a forced guess (which is purportedly sensitive to unconscious processing), has remained a focus of research interest. Whereas the early studies often focused on sensory judgments about nonsymbolic stimuli such as weights and lines, Marcel and others (

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“…The classical view on right-hemispheric contributions is the involvement in decoding ambiguity, metaphors and distant semantic relationships (Koivisto, 1997;Abdullaev and Posner, 1997;Chiarello, 1998). In addition, the contribution of the right hemisphere involves decisions about semantic relations between words (Faust, 1998;Beeman and Chiarello, 1998). Just and colleagues (1996) The main aim of this study was to assess lateralization of language function using both dichotic listening and fMRI-based region-specific LIs, in order to clarify the usability of both methods in clinical lateralization assessment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Right-hemispheric brain activation correlates to language performance

et al. 2010

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Language function in the right-hemispheric homologues of Broca"s and Wernicke"s areas does not only correlate with left-handedness or pathology, but occurs naturally in righthanded healthy subjects as well. In the current study, two non-invasive methods of assessing language lateralization are correlated with behavioral results in order to link hemispheric dominance to language ability in healthy subjects.Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) together with a sentence-completion paradigm was used to determine region-specific lateralization indices in the left-and rightsided Broca"s and Wernicke"s areas, the frontal temporal lobe, the anterior cingulate cortex and the parietal lobe. In addition, dichotic listening results were used to determine overall language lateralization and to strengthen conclusions by correlating with fMRI indices.Results showed that fMRI lateralization in the superior parietal, the posterior temporal, and the anterior cingulate cortices correlated to dichotic listening. A decreased right ear advantage (REA), which indicates less left-hemispheric dominance in language, correlated with higher performance in most administered language tasks, including reading, language ability, fluency, and non-word discrimination. Furthermore, right hemispheric involvement in the posterior temporal lobe and the homologue of Broca"s area suggests better performance in behavioral language tasks. This strongly indicates a supportive role of the right-hemispheric counterparts of Broca"s and Wernicke"s areas in language performance.

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Complementary Right- and Left-Hemisphere Language Comprehension

Cited by 153 publications

References 21 publications

Laterality and language experience

Laterality and language experience

Semantic processing without conscious identification: Evidence from event-related potentials.

Right-hemispheric brain activation correlates to language performance

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