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 trials, participants listened for a prespecified target melody, and in a second block they listened for a prespecified target instrument. Females were more accurate on the left ear in the melody task (whereas males 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 more strongly lateralized for verbal stimuli and females more strongly lateralized for non-verbal stimuli. No relation was observed between lambda measures for the two tasks, suggesting that laterality for melody processing is independent of laterality for timbre processing.