Interactions Between Hemispheres When Disambiguating Ambiguous Homograph Words During Silent Reading

A model of certain aspects of the cortex related to reading is developed corresponding to ongoing exploration of psychophysical and computational experiments on how the two hemispheres work in humans. The connectivity arrangements between modelled areas of orthography, phonology and semantics are according to the theories of Eviatar and Peleg, in particular with distinctions between the connectivity in the right and left hemisphere. The two hemispheres are connected and interact both in training and testing in a reasonably "natural" way. We found that the RH (right hemisphere) serves to maintain alternative meanings under this arrangement longer than the LH for homophones. This corresponds to the usual theories (about homographs) while, surprisingly, the LH maintains alternative meanings longer then the RH for heterophones. This allows the two hemispheres, working together to resolve ambiguities regardless of when the disambiguating information arrives. Human experiments carried out subsequent to these results bear this surprising result out.