CORRELATED AUDITORY ASYMMETRIES IN LEXICAL AND NONLEXICAL TASKS

Two experiments address the question of whether different auditory ver bal tasks produce correlated asymmetries. The first shows that ear asy mmetries from dichotic word and syllable tasks do in fact correlate, b ut not to asymmetry from a visual face processing task. The second rep licates the correlation between word and syllable asymmetries and show s that this significant relationship does not extend to another dichot ic task involving the recognition of emotional tones of voice. The res ults are viewed as consistent with a left-hemisphere based ''auditory linguistic'' process involved in recognizing both lexical and nonlexic al materials.