Perceptual asymmetries and stimulus dominance in dichotic listening with natural fricatives

Abstract The present study examined the psychometric properties and the pattern of stimulus dominance in a new task using natural fricatives as consonants in a dichotic consonant–vowel pairs task. The fricatives f, ʒ, s, ʃ, v, and z paired with the vowel a pronounced by a female speaker were presented dichotically to 69 participants (26 males, 43 females) in two sessions of 120 trials. Results revealed a large, reliable, and valid right ear advantage (REA). A pattern of stimulus dominance also emerged, suggesting some dominance on the global level for post-alveolar fricatives over other places of articulation. However, pair by pair examination of the dominance pattern showed a clear tendency for less frequently used fricatives to dominate over more frequently used fricatives. Finally, the significant REA persisted even when syllable pairs where dominance was obtained were considered separately. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for an understanding of stimulus dominance and future research directions with this novel task.

[1]  M. Kinsbourne.  The cerebral basis of lateral asymmetries in attention. , 1970, Acta psychologica.

[2]  M. Bryden.  An overview of the dichotic listening procedure and its relation to cerebral organization. , 1988 .

[3]  M. Hiscock,et al.  Toward solving the inferential problem in laterality research: Effects of increased reliability on the validity of the dichotic listening right-ear advantage , 2000, Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.

[4]  K. Hugdahl,et al.  Lateralization of cognitive processes in the brain. , 2000, Acta psychologica.

[5]  D. Kimura.  Functional Asymmetry of the Brain in Dichotic Listening , 1967 .

[6]  D. Pisoni,et al.  The Handbook of Speech Perception , 2004 .

[7]  K. Munhall,et al.  Attentional biases and the right-ear effect in dichotic listening , 1983, Brain and Language.

[8]  D. Klisz.  Visual Field Differences between a Fricative and a Stop Consonant , 1980, Cortex.

[9]  P. Milenkovic,et al.  Statistical analysis of word-initial voiceless obstruents: preliminary data. , 1988, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[10]  M. P. Bryden,et al.  Different Dimensions of Hand Preference That Relate to Skilled and Unskilled Activities , 1989, Cortex.

[11]  M. Bryden,et al.  Controlling for stimulus dominance in dichotic listening tests: A modification of !l. , 1994 .

[12]  S. Blumstein,et al.  The characteristics of voicing in syllable-initial fricatives in American English. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[13]  D. Voyer,et al.  On the magnitude of laterality effects and sex differences in functional lateralities. , 1996, Laterality.

[14]  R. Diehl,et al.  Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation , 1994, Phonetica.

[15]  Daniel Voyer,et al.  Reliability and magnitude of perceptual asymmetries in a dichotic word recognition task. , 2003, Neuropsychology.

[16]  L. Raphael.  Acoustic Cues to the Perception of Segmental Phonemes , 2008, The Handbook of Speech Perception.

[17]  Daniel Voyer,et al.  Dichotic listening with consonant-vowel pairs: The role of place of articulation and stimulus dominance , 2009, J. Phonetics.

[18]  Jacob Cohen.  Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[19]  G. Underwood.  Strategies of information processing , 1980 .

[20]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .

[21]  C. Darwin.  Ear Differences in the Recall of Fricatives and Vowels , 1971, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[22]  D. Kimura.  Cerebral dominance and the perception of verbal stimuli. , 1961 .

[23]  W. O. Dingwall,et al.  Hemispheric processing of affective and linguistic intonation contours in normal subjects , 1988, Brain and Language.

[24]  Jan Edwards,et al.  Some Cross-Linguistic Evidence for Modulation of Implicational Universals by Language-Specific Frequency Effects in Phonological Development , 2008, Language learning and development : the official journal of the Society for Language Development.

[25]  D. Voyer,et al.  Reliability and Magnitude of Auditory Laterality Effects: The Influence of Attention , 2001, Brain and Cognition.

[26]  R. S. McGowan,et al.  The emergence of phonetic segments: evidence from the spectral structure of fricative-vowel syllables spoken by children and adults. , 1989, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[27]  Kenneth Hugdahl,et al.  Handbook of dichotic listening: Theory, methods and research. , 1988 .

[28]  Kenneth Hugdahl,et al.  The effect of stimulus intensity on the right ear advantage in dichotic listening , 2008, Neuroscience Letters.

[29]  S. Blumstein,et al.  Acoustic and perceptual characteristics of voicing in fricatives and fricative clusters. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[30]  C. Speaks,et al.  Stimulus dominance in dichotic listening. , 1977, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[31]  Kenneth Hugdahl,et al.  The effect of voice-onset-time on dichotic listening with consonant–vowel syllables , 2006, Neuropsychologia.

[32]  B. J. Winer.  Statistical Principles in Experimental Design , 1992 .

[33]  Brenda Milner,et al.  Clinical and Surgical Studies of the Cerebral Speech Areas in Man , 1975 .

[34]  D. A. Sprott,et al.  Statistical determination of degree of laterality , 1981, Neuropsychologia.

[35]  Terry Halwes,et al.  Increasing the power of dichotic methods: The fused rhymed words test , 1983, Neuropsychologia.