Music & Language Studies

HALPERIN, Y, I. Nachshon, and A. Carmon. “Shift of Ear Superiority in Dichotic Listening to Temporally Patterned Nonverbal Stimuli.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 53/1 (1973): 46-50.

Two dichotic listening experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sequential complexity will influence the hemispheric dominance for audition. Specifically, it was argued that:

since one important feature of verbal material is its sequential character, it may be assumed that nonverbal but sequentially patterned sounds will be mediated by the left hemisphere. (46).

The experiments consisted of testing for hemispheric superiority with frequency-varied and duration-varied stimuli. The variance was very simple, entailing only two levels of frequency (high and low), and two durations (long and short) in the respective experiments. Each trial presented subjects with three sounds, either all the same in pitch or duration, varying once in the respective domain, or varying twice. The findings suggest that as complexity increased hemispheric dominance shifted, beginning in the right hemisphere and moving to the left. The major conclusion is as follows:

Kimura (1967) implied hemispheric dichotomy in processing verbal and nonverbal stimuli—verbal stimuli being mediated by the right hemisphere. The data of the present study, however, do not support her implication. If under certain conditions, such as temporal patterning, nonverbal stimuli are mediated by the left hemisphere, then a simple verbal-nonverbal categorization of stimuli in terms of hemispheric specialization does not hold.