Right hemisphere metaphor processing? Characterizing the lateralization of semantic processes [An article from: Brain and Language]

This digital document is a journal article from Brain and Language, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Previous laterality studies have implicated the right hemisphere in the processing of metaphors, however it is not clear if this result is due to metaphoricity per se or another aspect of semantic processing. Three divided visual field experiments varied metaphorical and literal sentence familiarity. We found a right hemisphere advantage for unfamiliar sentences containing distant semantic relationships, and a left hemisphere advantage for familiar sentences containing close semantic relationships, regardless of whether sentences were metaphorical or literal. This pattern of results is consistent with theories postulating predominantly left hemisphere processing of close semantic relationships and predominantly right hemisphere processing of distant semantic relationships.