Music & Language Studies

STUDDERT-KENNEDY, Michael and Donald Shankweiler. “Hemispheric Specialization for Speech Perception.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 48/2-2 (1970): 579-94.

Follows along the lines of Philip Lieberman, considering the evolution of the human vocal tract and concomitant perceptual structures as the primary focus for research. This is in contrast to an approach that would focus on higher-level cognitive mechanisms. Argues that more fruitful investigations will proceed from studying such lower-level language functions (production and perception). Their stimuli consisted of nonsense (consonant-vowel-consonant) syllables, wherein the consonants of each pair remained constant, and different vowels were presented to each ear. Subjects were asked to identify both vowels. Findings show a weak (non-significant) overall preference for the right ear, with about a third of the subjects actually showing a left-ear advantage. While ostensibly building on Kimura (1967), there is little attempt to identify the acoustic features that properly distinguish linguistic speech from non-linguistic sound. Although suggesting that research should focus on perception, the experimenters choose a linguistic description (i.e. “consonant-vowel-consonant”), not a perceptual or acoustic one to describe the stimuli under study. As Kimura intimated however it is not entirely self-evident that such a description is sufficient. Argues that hemispheric dominance for language is “due to possession of a linguistic device, not to specialized capacities for auditory analysis.” (579)