Lateralized effects of language on perception

The question of whether language affects perception has previously been debated largely on the basis of cross-language data, without considering the functional organization of the brain. The nature of this neural organization predicts that, if language affects perception, it should do so more in the right visual field than in the left visual field. In the three main experiments described here, support is found for this proposal. The first and second experiments involve lateralized perceptual discrimination tasks while the third employs an electroencephalographic approach. In the first experiment, reaction times to targets in the right visual field are found to be faster when the target and distractors have different names; in contrast, reaction times to targets in the left visual field are unaffected by the names of the target and distractors. This suggests that people view the right (but not the left) half of their visual world through the lens of their native language, a phenomenon that is dubbed "the lateralized Whorf effect." This effect is found to be disrupted when participants perform a secondary task that engages verbal working memory but not a task making comparable demands on spatial working memory. In the second experiment, it is demonstrated that the effect is not limited to color but extends to discrimination of animal figures and may be quite general. The third, electroencephalographic experiment reveals two deviance-related negativities that are observed only when a deviant stimulus is from a different lexical category than a standard stimulus and only when that deviant is presented in the right visual field. The results seem to provide support for a semantic activation-based explanation of the lateralized Whorf effect.