Dichotic perception of initial consonants and lexical tone in Cantonese

Abstract

At a previous meeting of the Society (November 1972) we reported an inability to detect an ear advantage in the dichotic perception of lexical tone for speakers of Cantonese. This negative result may have arisen from a possible nonlinguistic response mode used in that study, as well as the overall high level of performance in the task for Cantonese speakers. In the present dichotic experiment, native speakers of Cantonese heard six meaningful CVC words which differed only in initial consonant, six CVC words differing only in lexical tone, and the same set of six tone words presented at an S/N ratio of − 10 dB. They responded by pressing buttons labeled with the appropriate Chinese characters. Preliminary analysis of the results shows that the tone words at the normal S/N ratio (40 dB) did not show a significant ear effect, while both the consonants and the tones at − 10 dB showed unidirectional ear effects. Non-Cantonese speakers in a control group showed a right-ear advantage for the consonants and a left-ear advantage for the tones at the normal S/N ratio.