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Concept
Dichotic listening
Summary
Dichotic listening is a psychological test commonly used to investigate selective attention and the lateralization of brain function within the auditory system. It is used within the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
In a standard dichotic listening test, a participant is presented with two different auditory stimuli simultaneously (usually speech), directed into different ears over headphones. In one type of test, participants are asked to pay attention to one or both of the stimuli; later, they are asked about the content of either the stimulus they were instructed to attend to or the stimulus they were instructed to ignore.
Donald Broadbent is credited with being the first scientist to systematically use dichotic listening tests in his work. In the 1950s, Broadbent employed dichotic listening tests in his studies of attention, asking participants to focus attention on either a left- or right-ear sequence of digits. He suggested that due to limited capacity, the human information processing system needs to select which channel of stimuli to attend to, deriving his filter model of attention.
In the early 1960s, Doreen Kimura used dichotic listening tests to draw conclusions about lateral asymmetry of auditory processing in the brain. She demonstrated, for example, that healthy participants have a right-ear superiority for the reception of verbal stimuli, and left-ear superiority for the perception of melodies. From that study, and others studies using neurological patients with brain lesions, she concluded that there is a predominance of the left hemisphere for speech perception, and a predominance of the right hemisphere for melodic perception.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Donald Shankweiler and Michael Studdert-Kennedy of Haskins Laboratories used a dichotic listening technique (presenting different nonsense syllables) to demonstrate the dissociation of phonetic (speech) and auditory (nonspeech) perception by finding that phonetic structure devoid of meaning is an integral part of language and is typically processed in the left cerebral hemisphere.
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