A Cross-Language Study of Perceptual Asymmetry
Terry Myers, J. J. Wolf · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1972
Recent findings that the speechdominant hemisphere is specialized at the level of distinctive feature analysis entail a prediction that the processing of acoustic cues embodying a feature distinction in a particular language is asymmetric for “native” listeners, but not asymmetric for nonspeakers of the language if their own language does not employ the contrast. Russian- and English-speaking listeners were presented dichotic sequences of syllables for identification of the consonants, i.e., the stops, categorized in Russian, but not in English, as palatalized or nonpalatalized. The results are discussed in the context of a recognition model equipped with a “filter” for feature selection.