Synthetic stimuli attenuate the effect of attention on the dichotic right-ear advantage.
This study assessed attentional effects on the right-ear advantage (REA) for a dichoticlistening task that used synthetic-speech syllables. Presenting subjects with monaural tone cues at various intervals prior to dichotic pairs of natural-speech syllables, T. A. Mondor and M. P. Bryden 1991 (The influence of attention on the dichotic REA. Neuropsychologia, 29, 1179-1190) found a reduced REA with longer intervals. This suggested that tone cues at longer intervals helped overcome a right-ear attentional bias. Despite sufficient statistical power, in the present study no reduction in the REA was found with longer intervals between tones and synthetic-speech syllables. As synthetic-speech stimuli tend to fuse better into the percept of a single stimulus than do natural-speech stimuli, attentional effects on the REA may be reduced with dichotic stimuli that fuse.
Department of Psychology, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11794-2500, USA. swiens@psych1.psy.sunysb.edu
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D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D000091402:Prohibitins; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors