Patients with unilateral, right frontal lobe damage (N = 13)
and matched controls (N = 20) performed a task of lexical
ambiguity resolution in order to explore the contribution of right frontal
regions to lexical-semantic priming. Word triplets consisting of balanced
homographs were presented to participants in four conditions:
concordant, discordant, neutral, and
unrelated. Controls demonstrated facilitation for concordant
meanings of homographs, as evidenced by their faster reaction times in the
concordant relative to the unrelated (baseline) condition, as well as a
lack of facilitation for the discordant meaning relative to the neutral
and concordant conditions. Results in patients with right frontal lobe
damage differed depending on the site of the lesion. Patients with lesions
restricted to the right medial frontal lobe only showed facilitation in
the neutral condition, while those with lesions encroaching upon the right
dorsolateral region demonstrated facilitation of both discordant and
concordant meanings relative to the baseline condition. These results
support a role for the right frontal lobe in semantic priming and suggest
possible specialization within the right prefrontal cortex for the
processing of lexical-semantic information. (JINS, 2005,
11, 132–143.)