title: Hemispheric differences in the effects of context on vowel perception.
abstract: Listeners perceive speech sounds relative to context. Contextual influences might differ over hemispheres if different types of auditory processing are lateralized. Hemispheric differences in contextual influences on vowel perception were investigated by presenting speech targets and both speech and non-speech contexts to listeners' right or left ears (contexts and targets either to the same or to opposite ears). Listeners performed a discrimination task. Vowel perception was influenced by acoustic properties of the context signals. The strength of this influence depended on laterality of target presentation, and on the speech/non-speech status of the context signal. We conclude that contrastive contextual influences on vowel perception are stronger when targets are processed predominately by the right hemisphere. In the left hemisphere, contrastive effects are smaller and largely restricted to speech contexts.
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands. m.j.sjerps@gmail.com
authors.forename: Matthias J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Sjerps
authors.forename: Holger
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Mitterer
authors.forename: James M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: McQueen
mesh_terms: D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009622:Noise; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*