Hemispheric processing of Chinese polysemy in the disyllabic verb/ noun compounds: an event-related potential study

Through the application of Chinese WordNet, the current study used the manipulation of visual field and the number of senses of the first character in Chinese disyllabic compounds to investigate the representation and the hemispheric processing of related senses in nouns and verbs. In the previous study, Huang et al. (2009) have found the ERP evidence to indicate single entry representation for Chinese polysemy in the left hemisphere; however, in the right hemisphere, they found sense inhibition which may be due to (1) the nature of hemispheric processing in dealing with semantic ambiguity or (2) the semantic activation from the separate-entry representation for senses. To clarify these possibilities, the study used the word class judgment task with the attempt to push subjects in a deeper level of lexical processing. The results revealed sense facilitation effect in the RH and suggested that in a deeper level, the RH had more possibility to observe the sense facilitation due to different efficiency of cerebral hemispheres.