Stimulus Dominance in Dichotic Listening

Abstract

If, in dichotic listening, vowel onsets of competing plosive-vowel sequences are separated by some 30-60 msec, the signal in the "lagging" ear is more intelligible than in simultaneous presentation (Berlin et al., 1973). The dominance of voiceless over voiced stops in voice-contrasting pairs as found in English (Sepaks and Niccum, 1977) may be due to this lag effect as VOTs of initial voice-contrasting pairs differ radically in English. Therefore, Dutch plosive-vowel sequences, which do not differ much in their VOT values, were presented dichotically. The competing stimuli were aligned with respect to their vocalic boundaries. No dominance of voiceless over voiced plosives could be found for Dutch; on the contrary, there was a slight advantage for voiced over voiceless plosives. When the competing plosives shared the feature voice, a right-ear advantage could be established. Thus, voiceless dominance in English probably results from the noise-burst alignment technique commonly used.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Berlin, C. and Lowe, S. ( 1972). Differential diagnostic evaluation: Central auditory function. In J. Katz (ed.), Handbook of Clinical Audiology (Baltimore).

Berlin, C. , Lowe-Bell, S. , Cullen, J. , Thompson, C. and Loovis, C. ( 1973). Dichotic speech perception: An interpretation of right ear advantage and temporal offset effects. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 53, 699-709.

Berlin, C. and McNeill, M.R. ( 1976). Dichotic listening. In N. Lass (ed.), Contemporary Issues in Experimental Phonetics (New York), pp. 327-387.

Broadbent, D.E. ( 1954). The role of auditory localization in attention and memory span. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America , 47, 191-196.

Cullen, J. , Thompson, C. , Hughes, L.F. Berlin, C. and Samson, D.S. ( 1974). The effects of varied acoustic parameters on performance in dichotic speech perception tasks. Brain and Language, 1, 307-322.

Gimson, A.C. ( 1971). Introduction to the Pronunciation of English (London) .

Goodglass, H. ( 1975). Developmental comparison of vowels and consonants in dichotic listening. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research , 16, 744-752.

Hannah, J.E. ( 1971). Phonetic and temporal titration of the dichotic right ear effect. Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University .

Kimura, D. ( 1961). Cerebral dominance and the perception of verbal stimuli , Canadian Journal of Psychology, 15, 156-164.

10.

Lehiste, I. ( 1970). Suprasegmentals (Cambridge, Mass.).

11.

Lisker, L. and Abramson, A.S. ( 1964). A cross-language study of voicing in initial stops: Acoustical measurements. Word, 20, 384-422.

12.

Shanks, J.A. and Ryan, W. ( 1976). A comparison of aphasic and non-braininjured adults on a dichotic CV-syllable listening task. Cortex, 12, 100-112.

13.

Shankweiler, D. ( 1970). An analysis of laterality effects in speech perception . In M. Horton (ed.), The Perception of Language (Columbus), pp. 185-200.

14.

Shankweiler, D. and Studdert-Kennedy, M. ( 1967). Identification of vowels and consonants presented to left and right ears. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology , 19, 59-63.

15.

Speaks, C. and Niccum, N. ( 1977). Variability of ear advantage in dichotic listening . Journal of the American Audiology Society, 3, 52-57.

16.

Speaks, C. , Niccum, N. , Johnson, C. and Carney, E. ( 1977). Stimulus dominance in dichotic listening. Paper presented at the 93rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania [Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 61, S65 (abstract)] .

17.

Studdert-Kennedy, M. and Shankweiler, D. ( 1970). Hemispheric specialization for speech perception . Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 48, 579-594.