likely that this methodological insight can easily account for reports of asymmetric P3 reductions in schizophrenia during typical oddball tasks. Rather, it seems more parsimonious to hypothesize that differences in neuroanatomy between patient samples involving asymmetric impairments of temporal lobe structures (as previously argued by O’Donnell et al.19 and Ford et al.26) are a major contributor to inconsistent findings of asymmetric N2/P3 reductions in schizophrenia across different laboratories. Patients without asymmetric structural impairments may not show asymmetric neurophysiologic deficits during simple tonal oddball tasks, which thereby appear unsuitable to probe a left-lateralized, language-related dysfunction in schizophrenia.46,47,94 In contrast, more demanding tasks that specifically probe linguistic and/or mnemonic processes are better suited to study specific impairments of cognitive function, and these have less ambiguously pointed to a left-lateralized dysfunction of phonological processing in schizophrenia.52,81–84
