Haskins Publications

Number	102
Year	1971
Drawer	2
Entry Date	04/02/1998
Authors	Darwin, C. J.
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Publication	Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 23, 46-62.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0102.pdf
Abstract	Reports two experiments on the free recall of dichotically presented synthetic speech sounds. In Experiment I, with 1 left-handed and 13 right-handed undergraduate and graduate students, it was shown that the right ear advantage for initial fricative consonants is not simply a function of the recognition response class, but that it is also a function of the particular acoustic cues used to achieve that response. This is true both for the whole response, and for the constituent phonetic features. In Experiment II, with 36 right-handed Subjects, it was shown that when both the response class and the particular stimuli presented on certain trials are held constant, the right ear advantage for the constant stimuli can be influenced by the range of other stimuli occurring in the experiment. Vowels showed a right ear advantage when, within the experiment, there was uncertainty as to vocal tract size, but they showed no ear advantage when all the vowels in the experiment were from the same vocal tract. These results are interpreted as demonstrating that there are differences between the ears, and probably between the hemispheres, at some stage between the acoustic analysis of the signal and its identification as a phonetic category.
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