Shift of ear superiority in dichotic listening to temporally patterned nonverbal stimuli

Abstract

The assumption that the direction of ear superiority in dichotic listening to sounds varies as a function of the number of stimulus transitions within sound sequences was tested in two experiments on 36 right-handed students. In each sequence, three sounds which varied in terms of either frequency or duration were employed. Subject's task was to report the sequences by ear. The results showed that as the number of frequency or duration transitions increased from zero to two, ear superiority shifted from left to right. The shift from left to right ear superiority as a function of the increase in the complexity of temporal patterning suggests that perception of temporal patterns might be one of the underlying mechanisms in speech perception.