The effects of Kanji attributes on visual field differences: examination with lexical decision, naming and semantic classification tasks.

Using three experimental tasks (lexical decision, naming and semantic classification), the relative contribution of various Kanji attributes in left and right visual field recognition was examined. The results showed that first, factors contributing to the left visual field processing of Kanji differed depending on the level of processing; second, in an early stage of processing, perceptual attributes such as the number of strokes was a strong contributing factor; and third, in a later stage both perceptual- and imagery-related attributes contributed strongly to left visual field or right hemisphere processing.