Hemispheric processing in bilinguals: The role of shared meanings across languages and sentential constraint

Abstract

In monolinguals, the right hemisphere plays a key role when readers process multiple meanings of ambiguous words and when text weakly leads to a specific outcome (i.e., is weakly constrained). However, currently little is known about the influence of word meanings and sentential constraint in the hemispheres of bilinguals. Using a divided visual field paradigm, we investigated how cognates, interlingual homographs, and control words (within strongly and weakly constrained sentences) influence hemispheric processing in bilinguals. In the current study, both languages showed facilitation in the right hemisphere, whereas only the language currently in use showed facilitation in the left hemisphere. In addition, bilinguals (unlike monolinguals) processed strongly constrained targets more quickly than weakly constrained targets in both hemispheres. Thus, bilinguals and monolinguals process shared meanings of words similarly in the right hemisphere, but process sentential constraint differently in the hemispheres.