Bilingual men but not women display less left ear but not right ear accuracy during dichotic listening compared to monolinguals.
Thirty monolingual university men and women and 33 bilingual university men and women who had learned English after 5 years of age were administered Roberts' Dichotic Word Listening Test. The bilingual men committed twice the numbers of errors for words presented to the left ear but not to the right ear or to both ears when compared to the bilingual women, the monolingual men, or the monolingual women. The latter three groups did not differ significantly from each other. This interaction between sex and language history explained about 16% of the variance in the numbers of errors for the left ear. The results are related to other studies that showed men who acquired English after the age of 5 years exhibited a relative weakness for verbal memory but not for figural memory compared to bilingual women or monolingual men and women. Implications for the relative accuracies of verbal memory are considered.
Persinger
M A
MA
Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory, Departments of Biology and Psychology, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada P3E 2C6. mpersinger@nickel.laurentian.ca
Chellew-Belanger
G
G
Tiller
S G
SG
D000328:Adult; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D004423:Ear; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D019303:Multilingualism; D012737:Sex Factors; D013067:Speech Perception