Rate of acoustic change may underlie hemispheric specialization for speech perception.
Phonemically similar syllables, differing only by temporal acoustic cues, were presented dichotically to investigate temporal processing mechanisms in hemispheric specialization for speech. Reducing the rate of acoustic change within syllables while keeping their phonemic characteristics constant significantly decreased the characteristic asymmetry in processing speech.
D000328:Adult; D001306:Auditory Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors