Effects of talker and of listener bias on stimulus dominance in dichotic listening.
Stimulus dominance, wherein a higher score occurs for one member of a pair of syllables presented dichotically, was investigated in two experiments. The first examined effects due to talker. Six stop consonant-vowel syllables were spoken by two talkers. The pattern of stimulus dominance was not significantly different for the two talkers, and stimulus dominance was not related to articulatory feature-sharing categories. The second experiment investigated whether stimulus dominance reflects a true perceptual superiority of one syllable over another or whether attentional strategies or biases by listeners contribute to the outcome. Syllables were spoken by a single talker. For one group of listeners, tendencies to attend selectively to one ear or the other were uncontrolled. For the second group, maximum performance could be achieved only by attending exclusively to the monitored ear. The magnitude and frequency of stimulus dominance was significantly smaller with the single-ear monitoring task, but ear dominance was unaffected.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception