Ideogram reading and right hemisphere language

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Abstract
Two experiments on the identification of ideographs are reported. In Expt 1 subjects showed a right visual field advantage when reporting Arabic numerals. A right visual field advantage was also obtained in Expt 2 when Chinese and Japanese subjects reported numbers presented in Arabic and Kanji formats. The results are discussed in the context of the literature which shows a left visual field advantage for the identification of single ideographs in Chinese and Japanese, and a right visual field advantage for items in alphabetic and syllabic scripts. It is suggested that it is not the direct mapping between ideographs and the morphemes of a language which yields a left visual field advantage, but associated incidental stimulus characteristics which make demands upon preprocessing operations that are carried out more efficiently in the right hemisphere. It is argued, therefore, that this literature does not address the question of whether, subsequent to preprocessing, alphabetic, syllabic and ideographic scripts are processed by dissociable mechanisms.