Identification reaction times of voiced/voiceless continua: A right-ear advantage for VOT values near the phonetic boundary

We explored the degree to which the duration of acoustic cues contributes t o the respective involvement of the two hemispheres in the perception of sp eech. To this end, we recorded the reaction time needed to identify monaura lly presented natural French plosives with varying VOT values. The results show that a right-ear advantage is significant only when the phonetic bound ary is close to the release burst, i.e., when the identification of the two successive acoustical events (the onset of voicing and the release from cl osure) needed to perceive a phoneme as voiced or voiceless requires rapid i nformation processing. These results are consistent with the recent hypothe sis that the left hemisphere is superior in the processing of rapidly chang ing acoustical information. (C) 2000 Academic Press.