RIGHT EAR ADVANTAGE FOR SPEECH PRESENTED MONAURALLY.

The article examines the right ear advantage in the processing of speech signals by right-handed people. Speech delivered to the left ear is transmitted to the right hemisphere by the contralateral path and has then to be relayed to the left hemisphere via the corpus callosum before undergoing the processing for which this hemisphere is specialized. Measurements of choice reaction time to a range of speech stimuli presented binaurally indicated that considerable variation in mean reaction time is to be expected even in conditions where the task requires the subject to perform only the first level of acoustic-phonemic decoding.