Right and left hemisphere cooperation for drawing predictive and coherence inferences during normal story comprehension

Mark Jung Beeman*, Edward M. Bowden, Morton Ann Gernsbacher

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

176 Scopus citations

Abstract

In three experiments, healthy young participants listened to stories promoting inferences and named inference-related test words presented to the right visual field - Left Hemisphere (rvf-LH) or to the left visual field - Right Hemisphere (lvf-RH). Participants showed priming for predictive inferences only for target words presented to the lvf-RH; in contrast, they showed priming for coherence inferences only for target words presented to the rvf-LH. These results, plus the fact that patients with RH brain damage have difficulty drawing coherence inferences and do not show inference- related priming, suggest that information capable of supporting predictive inferences is more likely to be initially activated in the RH than the LH, but following coherence breaks these concepts (now coherence inferences) are completed in the LH. These results are consistent with the theory that the RH engages in relatively coarse semantic coding, which aids full comprehension of discourse. (C) 2000 Academic Press.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)310-336
Number of pages27
JournalBrain and Language
Volume71
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2000

Funding

This work was supported in part by Grant R29 DC02160 from the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders, NIH, to M.J.B. and by Grant RO1 NS 29926 from NIH and Army Research Institute awards DASW0194-K-0004, DASW0196-K-0013, and DAAG55-97-1-0224 to M.A.G. Thanks to Jim Tanaka, Marie Banich, Christine Chiarello, Art Graesser, and Edward O’Brien for useful comments on an earlier versions of the manuscript. Thanks to the following people for help with stimulus preparation and data collection: Caroline Bollinger, Julie Foertsch, Kim Hassenfeld, Donald Haughton, Dana Janes, Ying Lu, Rachel Roberston, Geeta Shivde, Beth Travis, and Linda Whitcombe. Correspondence and reprint requests should be addressed to Mark Jung Beeman, Rush Cognitive Neuroscience Section, 1645 West Jackson Boulevard, Suite 450, Chicago, IL 60612, E-mail: [email protected].

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Speech and Hearing
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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