Correlated auditory asymmetries in lexical and nonlexical tasks.

Two experiments address the question of whether different auditory verbal tasks produce correlated asymmetries. The first shows that ear asymmetries from dichotic word and syllable tasks do in fact correlate, but not to asymmetry from a visual face processing task. The second replicates the correlation between word and syllable asymmetries and shows that this significant relationship does not extend to another dichotic task involving the recognition of emotional tones of voice. The results are viewed as consistent with a left-hemisphere based "auditory linguistic" process involved in recognizing both lexical and nonlexical materials.