Hemispheric Performance in Detecting Prosody: A Competitive Dichotic Listening Task

Abstract

Ross's 1981 model of right-hemisphere processing of affective speech components was investigated within the dichotic paradigm. A spoken sentence constant in semantic content but varying among mad, sad, and glad emotional tones was presented to 45 male and 45 female college students. Duration of stimuli was controlled by adjusting digital sound samples to a uniform length. No effect of sex emerged, but the hypothesized ear advantage was found: more correct identifications were made with the left ear than with the right. A main effect of prosody was also observed, with significantly poorer performance in identifying the sad tone; in addition, sad condition scores for the right ear were more greatly depressed than those for the left ear, resulting in a significant interaction of ear and prosody.

Processamento auditivo em indivíduos com epilepsia de lobo temporal

“…Notwithstanding, these findings are in disagreement from others that did report left ear advantages towards the processing of non-verbal stimuli, such as tonal sequences, melodies, prosodic characteristics and sound effects 26,31,32,[34][35][36][37] . The difference observed between the results of this paper and those from the surveyed literature may be due to factors such as different testing conditions, stimulus type and presentation mode 37,39 .…”

“…Other authors describe in their papers that response asymmetry at dichotic tasks is to be expected if the stimuli presented to both ears are simultaneous and of the same duration. If that is not the case, the stimulation works as if it were two monoaural presentations, making the asymmetry disapear 21,31 .…”

“…Herrero, Hillix (1990) used phrases as stimuli in their study, however considered their prosodic content variable 31 . Studies using similar stimuli to the ones used here assessed normal and epileptic individuals with the non-verbal test 8,29 .…”

“…Studies carried out with normal individuals show a clear preference for the Left Ear for the processing of non-linguistic sounds 26,[31][32][33][35][36][37] , except if the tests are applied to musicians 32,35 . However, in Brazil, Ortiz, Pereira, Vilanova (2003) did not state this type of occurrence, they did observe a response symmetry at the Test stage which freed the individuals to respond the stimuli presented to any of two ears and when compared to the stages that forced the individuals response to the right ear (OD) or to the left ear (OE) 8 .…”

Peripheral responses to attended and unattended angry prosody: A dichotic listening paradigm

“…Rodway and Schepman (2007) observed a right-hemisphere advantage for genuine emotional prosody (cf. Herrero & Hillix, 1990;Ley & Bryden, 1982;Schmitt, Hartje, & Willmes, 1997), but not for morphed emotional prosody (fundamental frequency of emotional utterances taken and imposed on initially neutral utterances) in a dichotic listening paradigm. They concluded that the ''laterality effect may be a useful tool for the detection of fake emotions'' (Rodway & Schepman, 2007, p. 31).…”