The Psychology of Word Meanings

10	Interpretation of Word Meanings by the Cerebral Hemispheres: One is Not Enough

Christine ChiarelloSyracuse University

INTRODUCTION

The field of cognitive psychology has had a great deal of success in understanding the mind as an abstract information processing system, without regard to its actual instantiation in the human nervous system. One benefit of this approach is that principles articulated in terms of information can then be implemented on any sort of hardware, and this surely has facilitated the rapid development of artificial intelligence systems. However, as psychologists, our primary interest is in human cognition which is mediated by a specific piece of hardware, the brain. Because our brain is the result of evolutionary pressures ...