In dichotic listening, two similar, yet different stimuli are presented simultaneously to the left and right ear. When two syllables are presented in this way, they seem to blend and discrimination of syllables presented to one ear is only possible with uncertainty. In this event-related fMRI study, we found that the orbitofrontal and paralimbic belts were involved in target detection in dichot...

The objective of the present study was to investigate the ability of adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to direct their attention and exert cognitive control in a forced instruction dichotic listening (DL) task. The performance of 29 adults with ADHD was compared with 58 matched controls from the Bergen Dichotic Listening Database (N>1500). Participants in the Bergen DL...

Judging from classic postmortem reports (cf., Goldstein, 1948; Kleist, 1952; Benson et al., 1973) and from recent studies using CT scanning (Damasio & Damasio, 1979a), conduction aphasia is often associated with damage to the left cortical auditory complex (the primary areas, Brodmann’s fields 41 and 42, and the association area, field 22). It follows that arrival of auditory input in the left ...

Dichotic listening to verbal stimuli results in a right ear advantage (REA), indicating a left hemisphere processing superiority. The magnitude of the REA can be modulated by instructions to direct attention to the left or right ear stimulus. A previous study from our laboratory showed that presenting a prime syllable before the presentation of the dichotic syllables increases reports of the no...

Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are speech perceptions that lack an external source, phenomenologically experienced as "hearing voices". A perceptual origin of an AVH experience in patients with schizophrenia can however not explain why the "voices" drain the attentional and cognitive capacity of the patients, making them unable to direct attention away from the "voices" and to cognitivel...

Dichotic listening performance was studied in children who at an early age had undergone a myringotomy with insertion of ventilating tubes for persistent middle ear infections (otitis media with effusion; OME) and compared with age-equivalent children who had no history of otitis media or hearing problems. The OME group consisted of 19 children with a median age of 9 years; 15 of whom were righ...

Structural and functional asymmetry in the human brain and nervous system is reviewed in a historical perspective, focusing on the pioneering work of Broca, Wernicke, Sperry, and Geschwind. Structural and functional asymmetry is exemplified from work done in our laboratory on auditory laterality using an empirical procedure called dichotic listening. This also involves different ways of validat...

Left-hemispheric language dominance is a well-known characteristic of the human language system, but the molecular mechanisms underlying this crucial feature of vocal communication are still far from being understood. The forkhead box P2 gene FOXP2, which has been related to speech development, constitutes an interesting candidate gene in this regard. Therefore, the present study was aimed at i...

In dichotic listening, a right ear advantage for linguistic tasks reflects left hemisphere specialization, and a left ear advantage for prosodic tasks reflects right hemisphere specialization. Three experiments used a response hand manipulation with a dichotic listening task to distinguish between direct access (relative specialization) and callosal relay (absolute specialization) explanations ...