Spectral masking occurs when the perception of one sound is affected by the presence of another sound like noise or unwanted sound of the same duration as the original sound. Earlier studies have shown that binaural dichotic presentation, using a pair of linear phase FIR comb filters with complementary magnitude responses, helps in reducing the effect of spectral masking. In the present study a...

We examined two commonly used dichotic listening tests for measuring the degree of hemispheric specialization for language in individuals who had undergone cerebral hemispherectomy: the consonant-vowel (CV) nonsense syllables and the fused words (FW) tests, using the common laterality indices f and lambda. Hemispherectomy on either side resulted in a massive contralateral ear advantage, demonst...

The establishment of an efficient exchange of information between the cerebral hemispheres is of crucial importance in the developing functionally lateralized brain. The corpus callosum, the major connection between the cerebral hemispheres, grows constantly throughout childhood and adolescence. However, behavioral studies suggest the existence of a critical time period for callosal functional ...

Language lateralization is reduced in schizophrenia patients relative to healthy individuals. It remains unclear whether these findings are moderated by the impaired attentional processes seen in the disorder. This study investigated whether patients increase their right ear advantage with the aid of a tone cue to systematically control for the effects of decreased alertness. Eighteen right-han...

Humans apply a minimum intervention principle to regulate treadmill walking, rapidly correcting fluctuations in the task-relevant variable (step speed: SS) while ignoring fluctuations in the task-irrelevant variables (step time: ST; step length: SL). We examined whether the regulation of fluctuations in SS and not in ST and SL depends on high-level, executive function, processes. Young adults w...

Dichotic listening (DL) procedures are commonly employed in the evaluation of auditory processing in children. Review of the various clinical tests reveals considerable diversity in both the signals employed and their mode of administration. The extent to which other non auditory-specific factors influence the test outcome is often difficult to determine. Individual differences in memory, atten...

In an effort to explore further the role of the right hemisphere in auditory processing, this study utilized brain event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate hemispheric asymmetry for the processing of complex spectral tones. Subjects participated in two pitch discrimination tasks, one diotic, the other dichotic. ERP components were recorded from 28 electrodes on the scalp and analyzed via ...

UNLABELLED Conductive hearing loss in the first years of life may lead to hearing processing and attention deficit disorders, and consequently to communication and learning impairments. AIM this paper aims to examine the performance of children with cleft lip and palate in dichotic listening tests (directed attention mode) and compare them to a control group without cleft lip and palate. MA...