Semantic Priming Effect By Two-word Chinese Characters In The Cerebral Hemispheres

Concrete and abstract two-word Chinese characters composed the study materials in the study, and the study paradigm of semantic priming was used to examine the semantic priming effect by two-word Chinese Characters in the cerebral hemispheres of left- and right-handed subjects. 48 college students participated in the study, which included 24 right-handers and 24 left-handers. The stimuli were presented in the monitor via tachistoscopic visual half-field technique, and the subjects were required to perform the lexical-decision tasks.The analysis of average response time and error rates showed that: (1) semantic priming effects were extremely significant in all experimental conditions. (2) under the condition of SOA_50ms, significant bilateral gains were observed in both right- and left-handed subjects. But under the condition of SOA_735ms, both response time and error rates were not different significantly among the four visual field conditions for all subjects. (3) response for concrete words was rapider than that for abstract words, but the semantic representations of them in the two cerebral hemispheres didn't differ from each other. (4) for right-handers, the semantic representation of intra-category concrete words existed in the left hemisphere, but that of inter-category concrete words was identical in the two cerebral hemispheres, the tendency for left-handers was the contrary.