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Lateralization of semantic processing is shaped by exposure to specific mother tongues: The case of insight problem solving by bilingual and monolingual native Hebrew speakers*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2013

NILI METUKI ,
SHANI SINKEVICH  and
MICHAL LAVIDOR
NILI METUKI
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
SHANI SINKEVICH
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
MICHAL LAVIDOR*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel & Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull, UK
*
Address for correspondence: Michal Lavidor, Department of Psychology, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan 52900, Israelmichal.lavidor@gmail.com
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Abstract

Solving insight problems is a complex task found to involve coarse semantic processing in the right hemisphere when tested in English. In Hebrew, the left hemisphere (LH) may be more active in this task, due to the inter-hemispheric interaction between semantic, phonological and orthographic processing. In two Hebrew insight problems experiments, we revealed a performance advantage in the LH, in contrast to the patterns previously observed in English. A third experiment, conducted in English with early Hebrew–English bilinguals, confirmed that the LH advantage found with Hebrew speakers does not depend on specific task requirements in Hebrew. We suggest that Hebrew speakers show redundancy between the hemispheres in coarse semantic processing in handling frequent lexical ambiguities stemming from the orthographic structure in Hebrew. We further suggest that inter-hemispheric interactions between linguistic and non-linguistic processes may determine the hemisphere in which coarse coding will take place. These findings highlight the possible effect of exposure to a specific mother tongue on the lateralization of processes in the brain, and carries possible theoretical and methodological implications for cross-language studies.

Keywords

insight problemshemispheresHebrewvisual fieldsbilinguals
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 900 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

This study was supported by the Israel Academy of Sciences grant no. 100/10, the Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE) in Cognition (I-CORE Program 51/11) and an ERC starting grant awarded to ML (Inspire 200512). We thank Chen Kleinman for his help in composing the insight problems, Haim Dubossarsky for his help in running the experiments, and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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