Association Process and Functional Brain Asymmetry

Analysis is presented of word associations produced by subjects with left hemispheric (group 1), right hemispheric (group 2), and bilateral (group 3) speech representation. The strategy for producing extralinguistic responses was found to prevail over the strategy for producing linguistic associations in all subjects, irrespective of their type of speech representation. This strategy was more pronounced in subjects with right hemispheric speech laterality, suggesting a correlation between the generation of extralinguistic associations and functional brain asymmetry. Producing linguistic associations also depended on the type of cerebral organization of speech. The most important linguistic associations are syntagmatic. Syntagmatic associations were more closely related to the lateralization of speech to the left hemisphere. The data are compared to the results of studies of the ontogeny of associative processes.