ABSTRACT
Recent research on sentence processing using ERPs (Event Related brain Potentials) has shown that there are situations in which the semantic relationships between words in a sentence are so strong that they can block the semantic interpretation that is actually prescribed by the syntactic structure of that sentence (Hoeks, Stowe, & Doedens, 2003; Kolk, Chwilla, van Herten, & Oor, in press). As syntactic processing is the assumed province of the left hemisphere (LH), it was hypothesized that this so-called ‘semantic illusion’ might result from a transient but apparently rather influential non-syntactic sentence representation formed in the right hemisphere (RH). Two reaction time experiments using the Divided Visual Field paradigm only partially supported this hypothesis, as they snowed that it is the LH that is most sensitive to semantic illusion.
