The right ear advantage revisited: Speech lateralisation in dichotic listening using consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant syllables

Author: Sætrevik, Bjørn

Source: Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain, and Cognition, Volume 17, Number 1, 1 January 2012 , pp. 119-127(9)

Publisher: Psychology Press, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

The dichotic listening task is typically administered by presenting a consonant-vowel (CV) syllable to each ear and asking the participant to report the syllable heard most clearly. The results tend to show more reports of the right ear syllable than of the left ear syllable, an effect called the right ear advantage (REA). The REA is assumed to be due to the crossing over of auditory fibres and the processing of language stimuli being lateralised to left temporal areas. However, the tendency for most dichotic listening experiments to use only CV syllable stimuli limits the extent to which the conclusions can be generalised to also apply to other speech phonemes. The current study re-examines the REA in dichotic listening by using both CV and vowel-consonant (VC) syllables and combinations thereof. Results showed a replication of the REA response pattern for both CV and VC syllables, thus indicating that the general assumption of left-side localisation of processing can be applied for both types of stimuli. Further, on trials where a CV is presented in one ear and a VC is presented in the other ear, the CV is selected more often than the VC, indicating that these phonemes have an acoustic or processing advantage.

Keywords: Dichotic listening; Right ear advantage; Language processing; Laterality

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1357650X.2010.551127

Affiliations: 1: Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Faculty of Psychology,University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Publication date: 2012-01-01

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