The processing of novel semantic association in Chinese: Converging evidence from behavior and fMRI studies

It´s still controversial that there exist specific regions in the right hemisphere (RH) to process long-distance semantic combination, or those activations are influenced by difficulty of processing. The present study used Chinese Two-part allegorical saying as stimuli to examine the role of RH in processing novel meanings of two-character words. Experiment 1 and experiment 2 used lexical decision task to test the processing of new words and novel meaning of old words in a given context. The results indicated that the comprehension of novel meanings needed relying on specific context to deduce its appropriate meaning by constructing novel relation of two morphemes. In experiment 3, we tried to investigate the brain mechanism of processing novel semantic association using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The data showed that processing the novel interpretation of old words and the meaning of new two-character words were associated with increased activity in right brain regions including the right superior temporal gyrus and right parahippocampal gyrus, which may together be involved in the formation of novel semantic association between the two morphemes of new words or old words.