Dichotic and Monotic Time-Staggered Speech Perception

At the previous meeting of this Society, we reported a lag effect in which the trailing syllable in a dichotic pair was more intelligible with time staggers at 15, 30, 60, and 90 msec. This paper presents data on 12 subjects who listened to time staggers of 90, 180, 250, and 500 msec. A special condition was also added in which the periodic portions of each pair were aligned without concern for the burst onset of the consonant. We called this the “boundary condition” and included it as a result of our observation that the voiceless consonant when paired with a voiced consonant is generally more intelligible in the dichotic condition. Both ears functioned about the same beyond 180-msec staggers. However, we found the boundary condition enhanced the right ear laterality effect and attenuated the voiceless over voiced preponderance seen in ordinary dichotic simultaneous listening. [Supported by the NIH.]