Dichotic listening: What does it measure?

Abstract

Auditory lateralization was investigated in 26 right-handed and 26 left-handed, normal subjects using seven different dichotic listening tests in each proband (free recall of digit lists, free recall of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, four different CV syllable monitoring paradigms, and free recall of Morse codes). Reliabilities calculated with the formula of Spearman-Brown were low for digit recall (0.29, corrected for test length: 0.50), but good for CV recall (0.83), CV monitoring (0.75–0.88), and Morse code recall (0.50, corrected for test length: 0.88). Nevertheless, intertest correlations were low, both for right- and left-handers (negative correlations ranging from -0.44 to -0.05, positive correlations ranging from 0.01 to 0.51). Only 38–77% of the right-handed and left-handed subjects retained one direction of ear advantage across any combination of two tests. The data suggest that different dichotic tests reveal different results. This may be due to psychometric, procedural, or phonetic properties. We conclude that individual predictions of language dominance are not justified using the dichotic tests evaluated in the present study.