A dual-process model is suggested for the processing of words with emotional meaning in the cerebral hemispheres. While the right hemisphere and valence hypotheses have long been used to explain the results of research on emotional stimulus processing, including nonverbal and verbal stimuli, data on emotional word processing are mostly inconsistent with both hypotheses. Three complementary lines of research data from behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies seem to suggest that both hemispheres have access to the meanings of emotional words, although their time course of activation may be different. The left hemisphere activates these words automatically early in processing, whereas the right hemisphere gains access to emotional words slowly when attention is recruited by the meaning of these words in a controlled manner. This processing dichotomy probably corroborates the complementary roles the two hemispheres play in data processing.

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For more than a century, language has been assumed to be entirely dependent on left-hemisphere-based processing. However, since the early 1960s, evidence for the right hemisphere's involvement in language processing, in particular in the semantic processing of words, has emerged. At least three complementary approaches have provided evidence of this: behavioral data from neurologically intact participants, the study of brain-damaged patients and the use of neuroimaging methods. The goal of this article is to review the major evidence from these three sources concerning the nature of the right hemisphere's contribution to the semantic processing of words. Overall, the data from these studies suggest that both the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere are crucial for semantic processing, with both hemispheres being involved in different ways in the processing of semantic knowledge. processing of words (i.e. the activation of aspects of word meaning in memory; Joanette et al. 1990;Beeman and Chiarello 1998;Jung-Beeman 2005).The fact that both hemispheres seem to be involved in language comprehension raises fundamental questions about how semantic networks are functionally organized across cerebral hemispheres and, more specifically, what role each hemisphere plays in processing word meaning. One informative approach for tackling this complex issue is the use of the semantic priming paradigm, which represents an important cognitive phenomenon. This paradigm has been a focus of research in the cognitive sciences for more than 30 years because priming is one of the most basic expressions of human memory, influencing how we perceive and interpret the world. Although numerous studies have used the semantic priming paradigm, some basic questions remain unresolved. One major question is how the strength of associations between words (i.e. associated word pairs such as apple-banana vs. non-associated word pairs such as apple-cloud) affects the nature of semantic priming within and across both hemispheres.The aim of this article is to review the existing evidence regarding the nature of interhemispheric cooperation for the semantic processing of words, with an emphasis on identifying the role of the RH in this process, which remains poorly understood. A better understanding of the RH's involvement in the semantic processing of words will provide a unique opportunity to understand the neural bases of language. This review will gather evidence from three complementary approaches: behavioral data from neurologically intact participants, the study of brain-damaged patients and the use of neuroimaging methods. Since the number of publications on language processing and, more specifically, on the neurobiological bases of the semantic processing of words exceeds what can be reviewed here, this article focuses on representative papers in each area. In order to provide a better understanding of word organization in semantic memory, the mechanisms of semantic priming will be presented in the first section of this article. In the fo...