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 ...

Three tests of dichotic listening utilizing speech signals as stimuli are included on the VA-CD Tonal and Speech Materials for Auditory Perceptual Assessment, Disc 1.0. They include a dichotic monosyllabic digits task, a dichotic synthetic sentences task, and a dichotic nonsense syllable (CV) task. Since the materials were specially recorded or created and recorded for use on the VA-CD, normati...

Behavioral and patient studies have suggested that during dichotic listening the ipsilateral auditory pathways are strongly inhibited, so that each hemisphere is treats the sound coming to the contralateral ear. We analysed the auditory N100m neuromagnetic evoked response following passive listening of dichotic tones of different frequencies. We found that the N100m in each hemisphere depended ...

The present study was carried out on a sample of 125 right-handed boys who are described as follows: 50 boys with dyslexia, 50 controls of a similar age, and 25 controls according to reading level. Using an objective procedure based on regression, we selected three subgroups from among the poor readers: children with difficulties in the lexical pathway (surface dyslexics), children with difficu...

Auditory laterality and hemispheric asymmetry The differing perceptual and cognitive functions of the two cerebral hemispheres is one of the great discoveries and mysteries of the human brain (see Hugdahl & Westerhausen, 2009 for a recent review of the field). Ever since the groundbreaking work by the Nobel Laureate Roger Sperry (see Sperry 1974), mapping the different functions of the cerebral...

In the present experiment, 25 adult subjects discriminated speech tokens ([ba]/[da]) or made pitch judgments on tone stimuli (rising/falling) under both binaural and dichotic listening conditions. We observed that when listeners performed tasks under the dichotic conditions, during which greater demands are made on auditory selective attention, activation within the posterior (parietal) attenti...

Dichotic Listening (DL) is a valuable tool to study emotional brain lateralization. Regarding the perception of sadness and anger through affective prosody, the main finding has been a left ear advantage (LEA) for the sad but contradictory data for the anger prosody. Regarding an induced mood in the laboratory, its consequences upon DL were a diminished right ear advantage (REA) for the inducti...