Hemispheric asymmetries for physical and semantic selection of visually presented words.

Two experiments investigated hemispheric specialization for different levels of encoding of visually presented words, testing normal adult humans. It was found that physical but not semantic selection of words into memory was better for the right than for the left visual field. This result suggests that it may be predominantly the physical rather than the semantic analysis of words which gives rise to the well established overall left hemisphere advantage of linguistic material. © 1978