Right‐ear advantage for voicing in subjects left‐ear dominant for pure tones

Abstract

It has been reported [Efron and Yund, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 59, 889–898 (1976)] that the relative salience of the two pitch components of a dichotically presented pair of tones is seldom equal: The pitch mixture is dominated by the right‐ear tone for some listeners and by the left‐ear tone for an equal number of other listeners. This spectrally related perceptual asymmetry was called ear dominance (ED) and was found to be independent of the well‐known right‐ear advantage (REA) observed for dichotically presented speech sounds. The present experiments attempted to isolate those components of REA which may derive from ED. Five subjects, left‐ear dominant for tones, were tested for their ear advantage for pairs of dichotic speech sounds in a 2AFC paradigm. The synthesized stimuli were vowel pairs (differing in tongue height and/or front‐back position) or CV pairs (differing either in voicing or in place of articulation). One subject displayed a left‐ear advantage for all stimuli. The four other subjects retained their left ED for all features that represent only a spectral difference (vowel features and place of articulation), whereas they acquired a REA for voicing, i.e, for the feature which is primarily temporal. [Supported by the VA.]