TITLE:
Left Hemisphere Lateralization of Categorical Color Perception among Roman and Arabic Script Readers
AUTHORS:
Abdulrahman Al-Rasheed, Anna Franklin, Gilda Drivonikou, Ian Davies
KEYWORDS:
Left Hemisphere; Lateralization; Categorical Perception; Linguistic; Reading Habits; Habitual Scanning; Reading Direction
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.5 No.3,
March
31,
2014
ABSTRACT: So far, the Left Hemisphere (LH) bias in color Categorical Perception
(CP) has been related to the linguistic nature of the LH and converging
evidence to support this hypothesis has been presented in several studies. As,
to date, no evidence of lateralized CP has been shown on right-to-left readers
in support of this theory. However, the influence of reading habits to
perception has been shown in various studies. This study aimed to investigate
the possible effect of habitual scanning on lateralization of color CP, by
comparing participants from two languages who vary in their reading direction:
right-to-left in Arabic and left-to-right in English. Lateralization of CP was
then tested in two groups of Arabic and English. The Arabic group consisted of
35 undergraduate students at King Saud University. The English group consisted
of 29 native English-speakers who were undergraduate students of Surrey University.
Their ages range from 18 to 30 years. Two tasks were used to test this
hypothesis: a visual search task with a reaction time measure; and a target
detection task with eye-movement measure. Both samples performed similarly and
the pattern of lateralization has been replicated, but this time, it has also
been shown that the effect is independent of habitual reading direction. It
appears that reading direction has no effect on how color CP is lateralized.