Frequency, Attention, and Phonetic Characteristics that Influence the Right-Ear Advantage for Speech Perception

The right-ear advantage (REA) for linguistic stimuli (Kimura, 1961, 1967) is thought to represent an asymmetry of speech perception favoring the left hemisphere. This study seeks to clarify how the REA is altered by: attention instructions, filtering of stimuli, background noise, and phonetic properties of stimuli, viz., voice onset time (VOT) and place of articulation (POA). Participants heard monosyllabic rhyming words from the Halwes (1990) Fused Dichotic Word Test and were instructed to attend to the left or right ear, or to divide attention equally. Stimuli in Experiment 1 were unfiltered, high-pass filtered, or low-pass filtered, and stimuli in Experiment 2 were presented with no noise, white noise, high-pass filtered noise, or low-pass filtered noise. The initial consonants of each dichotic pair were categorized according to POA (bilabial, alveolar, or velar) and VOT (voiced or unvoiced). Repeated-measures ANOVAs performed on laterality ratios showed statistically significant main effects for attention, background noise, VOT, and POA. Right-ear attention, the absence of background noise, and bilateral bilabial presentation enhanced the right-ear advantage. Furthermore, attention interacted with background noise, POA, and VOT.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Houston

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• McCulloch, Katie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hiscock, Merrill

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Foss, Donald J.
• Jansen, Ben H.

• Speech laterality
• Speech perception
• Dichotic listening

Statement dc:rights

• The author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10657/223

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uh-ir.tdl.org:10657/223