Effects of ear preference and order bias on the reception of verbal materials.

Abstract

This experiment investigated Inglis' hypothesis that dichotic verbal material presented to the right ear is produced correctly more often than the stimuli presented to the left ear because individuals respond initially to the material at the right ear and thus are subject to greater trace decay on that presented to the left ear. Two types of dichotic materials (digits and nonsense syllables) were used. The digits and nonsense syllables were presented in quiet and also in a background of white noise. Different groups of 24 young adult subjects were used in four basic experiments. The subjects in each experiment were tested under the following conditions: (1) no bias; (2) right bias (instructed to respond to right ear presentations initially), and (3) left bias (instructed to respond to left ear presentations initially). Results of the no bias conditions suggest a tendency for more correct responses from right ear than from left ear presentations (even though order of response was divided almost equally between the ears). However the superiority is only a modest statistical one. When instructional bias was imposed, the results always favored the ear of the instructed bias.