THE EFFECT OF REDUNDANCY IN SHADOWING ONE OF TWO DICHOTIC MESSAGES.

The article investigates the effect of redundancy in shadowing one of two dichotic messages. Passages of prose approaching in varying degrees of statistical approximation to English were presented to subjects to shadow while normal prose which they were to disregard was presented to their other ear. It was found that the number of mistakes in shadowing varied inversely with the order of approximation to English, while the number of omissions varied inversely with the logarithm of the order of approximation. These results are discussed in the light of recent experiments on attention.