Hemispheric differences in case processing

Morphosyntactic capacities of normal brain hemispheres were compared in lexical decision studies involving centrally and laterally presented Serbo-Croatian nouns in different cases. Cases are distinguished by different suffixes and syntactic roles. Experiment 1 confirmed and extended previous findings of the nominative superiority effect: words in the nominative case were processed faster and more accurately than words in other three cases, and nonwords in the nominative case led to more false positive reactions than nonwords in other cases. In Experiment 2 this effect was replicated for right visual field stimuli: nominatives had faster reaction times and smaller error rates than accusatives, and the reversed pattern was found for nonwords. For left visual field stimuli, only the word error analysis found the nominative superior, while the other three analyses (word reaction times, nonword reaction times, and nonword error rates) showed no significant case effect. Word familiarity had an equally strong effect in both hemispheres. The results suggest that centrally presented stimuli are processed by the left hemisphere, that laterally presented stimuli are processed by the initially receiving hemisphere, and that the right hemisphere has a frequency-sensitive lexicon. Reduced right-hemisphere sensitivity for case differences may be due to different lexicon structure or the absence of appropriate morphological or syntactic mechanisms.