Hemispheric specialization for voice recognition: evidence from dichotic listening.

To measure lateralization of voice recognition abilities in normal subjects, listeners identified both the speaker (a famous male) and the word spoken on each trial in a dichotic listening paradigm. The voice identification task resulted in a zero ear advantage, which differed significantly from the significant right ear advantage found for word identification. This suggests that voice and word information, although carried in the same auditory signal, engage different cerebral mechanisms.