LATERALITY EFFECTS IN THE PROCESSING OF MELODY AND TIMBRE

Laterality for the processing of melody and timbre was investigated in 64 right-handed non-musicians. In one block of dichotic-listening tri als, participants listened for a prespecified target melody, and in a second block they listened for a prespecified target instrument. Femal es were more accurate on the left ear in the melody task (whereas male s tended to show no ear advantage), but there were no significant ear differences in the timbre task for either sex. This supports the idea of a complementary sex-based pattern of lateralization, with males mor e strongly lateralized for verbal stimuli and females more strongly la teralized for non-verbal stimuli. No relation was observed between lam bda measures for the two tasks, suggesting that laterality for melody processing is independent of laterality for timbre processing. (C) 199 7 Elsevier Science Ltd.