Research investigating hemispheric asymmetries in meaning selection using homophonic homographs (e.g., "bank"), suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) quickly selects contextually relevant meanings, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) maintains a broader spectrum of meanings including those that are contextually irrelevant (e.g., Faust & Chiarello,…

Prior work has related sentence processing to executive deficits in non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). We extended this investigation to patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and PD dementia (PDD) by examining grammatical and working memory components of sentence processing in the full range of patients with Lewy body…

This study aimed at examining sensitivity to lateral linguistic and nonlinguistic information in third and fifth grade readers. A word identification task with a threshold was used, and targets were displayed foveally with or without distractors. Sensitivity to lateral information was inferred from the deterioration of the rate of correct word…

Valence-specific laterality effects have been frequently obtained in facial emotion perception but not in vocal emotion perception. We report a dichotic listening study further examining whether valence-specific laterality effects generalise to vocal emotions. Based on previous literature, we tested whether valence-specific laterality effects were…

The present study examined the relationship between individual differences in dichotic listening (DL) and the susceptibility to left-right confusion (LRC). Thirty-six men and 59 women completed a consonant-vowel DL test, a behavioral LRC task, and an LRC self-rating questionnaire. Significant negative correlations between overall DL accuracy and…

Studies have suggested that supramodal attentional resources are biased rightward due to asymmetric spatial fields of the two hemispheres. This bias has been observed especially in right-handed subjects. We presented left and right-handed subjects with brief uniform grey visual stimuli in either the left or right visual hemifield. Consistent with…

The present study investigated a possible connection between speech processing and cochlear function. Twenty-two subjects with age range from 18 to 39, balanced for gender with normal hearing and without any known neurological condition, were tested with the dichotic listening (DL) test, in which listeners were asked to identify CV-syllables in a…

Schizophrenia has been associated with deficits in functional brain lateralization. According to some authors, the reduction of asymmetry could even promote this psychosis. At the same time, schizophrenia is accompanied by a high prevalence of nicotine dependency compared to any other population. This association is very interesting, because…

In this study we investigated with a priming paradigm whether uni and bimanual actions presented as primes differently affected language processing. Animals' (self-moving entities) and plants' (not self-moving entities) names were used as targets. As prime we used grasping hands, presented both as static images and videos. The results showed an…

The present study quantified the magnitude of sex differences in perceptual asymmetries as measured with dichotic listening. This was achieved by means of a meta-analysis of the literature dating back from the initial use of dichotic listening as a measure of laterality. The meta-analysis included 249 effect sizes pertaining to sex differences and…

Previous dual-task research pairing complex visual tasks involving non-spatial cognitive processes during dichotic listening have shown effects on the late component (Ndl) of the negative difference selective attention waveform but no effects on the early (Nde) response suggesting that the Ndl, but not the Nde, is affected by non-spatial…

This study investigates the temporal resolution capacities of the central-auditory system in a subject (NP) suffering from repetition conduction aphasia. More specifically, the patient was asked to detect brief gaps between two stretches of broadband noise (gap detection task) and to evaluate the duration of two biphasic (WN-3) continuous noise…

The present study investigated the influence of within- and between-ear congruency on interference and laterality effects in an auditory semantic/prosodic conflict task. Participants were presented dichotically with words (e.g., mad, sad, glad) pronounced in either congruent or incongruent emotional tones (e.g., angry, happy, or sad) and…

Research over the last few years has shown that the dominance of the left hemisphere in language processing is less complete than previously thought [Beeman, M. (1993). "Semantic processing in the right hemisphere may contribute to drawing inferences from discourse." "Brain and Language," 44, 80-120; Faust, M., & Chiarello, C. (1998). "Sentence…

Eighteen temporal lobectomy patients (9 left, LTL; 9 right, RTL) were administered four verbal tasks, an Affective Implicit Task, a Neutral Implicit Task, an Affective Explicit Task, and a Neutral Explicit Task. For the Affective and Neutral Implicit Tasks, participants were timed while reading aloud passages with affective or neutral content,…