Abstract
The Right Ear Advantage effect (REA) was explored in a white noise speech illusion paradigm: binaural white noise (WN) could be presented i) in isolation (WN condition), ii) overlapped to a voice pronouncing the vowel /a/ presented in the left ear (LE condition), iii) overlapped to a voice pronouncing the vowel /a/ presented in the right ear (RE condition). Participants were asked to report in which ear the voice has been perceived. The voice could be female or male, and it could be presented at 4 different intensities. Participants carried out the task correctly both in LE and in RE conditions. Importantly, in the WN condition the “right ear” responses were more frequent with respect to both the chance level and the “left ear” responses. A perceptual REA was confirmed both in LE and RE conditions. Moreover, when the voice was presented at low intensities (masked by WN), it was more frequently reported in the right than in the left ear (“illusory” REA). A positive correlation emerged between perceptual and illusory REA. Potential links of the REA effects with auditory hallucinations are discussed.
Highlights
A left-hemispheric superiority for language processing has been established since the pioneering discoveries by Broca[1]
We hypothesized a better performance when the voice belonged to a person the same sex as the participant: such an Own-Gender Bias (OGB) was found in voice perception, at least in male listeners[39], to the well-known OGB found in face perception[40,41], and we tested whether it is present in the white noise speech illusion paradigm
The Kolmogorov–Smirnov normality test showed that all data were normally distributed, and the Levene test confirmed that homogeneity of variance was satisfied
Summary
A left-hemispheric superiority for language processing has been established since the pioneering discoveries by Broca[1]. The asymmetry found by means of this paradigm using verbal auditory stimuli is called Right Ear Advantage (REA18): when asked to report which of the two stimuli is heard better, listeners are more likely to report that presented in the right ear This bias has been confirmed by neuroimaging studies (i.e.19,20) and it is attributed to the left-hemispheric superiority in language processing, as a result of an inter-hemispheric balance between left and right temporal cortices. In AH, the hypothesized deficit in top-down inhibition is thought to result in hyperactivity in the temporal language areas This hypothesis was confirmed in an fMRI study carried out by Hunter and colleagues[32] on healthy participants: the authors found a left temporal activity during silence, with a subsequent activation of the right-hemispheric homotopic regions. In order to verify the relationship between REA and handedness and between REA and the proneness to experience hallucinatory percepts in the non-clinical population, correlational analyses were carried out
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