Dichotic listening with consonant–vowel pairs: The role of place of articulation and stimulus dominance

The present study investigated the possibility that the place of articulation in stop-consonant–vowel syllable pairs would affect the magnitude and direction of perceptual asymmetries in a dichotic listening task. Forty-one participants were presented dichotically with stop-consonant–vowel syllable pairs and asked to detect a specific target syllable. Stimulus pairs were analyzed in terms of the combination of place of articulation presented to each ear for the stop consonant. The expected right ear advantage (REA) was obtained. However, the ear advantage varied in such a way that location of the velar syllable typically produced better performance for the relevant ear. The effect of place of articulation on the ear advantage became non-significant when stimulus dominance was controlled. The results are interpreted in terms of the role of sub-phonemic components of speech and stimulus dominance in the measurement of auditory asymmetries. Their implications for models of dichotic listening are also discussed.