The present experiment explored the differential rôle of the left and right ears in perceiving linguistic stimuli on the level of sentences. Sentences with identical syntactic structure but varying in semantic constraint [i.e., “The farmer plowed the field” (semantically well integrated) vs “The Indian hit the table” (semantically poorly integrated)] were presented to the left or right ear of 10 right-handed subjects. Listeners were required to listen to and then immediately repeat each sentence after presentation. A special speech-noise distortion circuit developed at the Communication Sciences Laboratory of The University of Michigan [M. A. H. O'Malley and G. E. Peterson, “An Experimental Method for Prosodic Analysis,” Phonetica 15, 1–13 (1966)] was used to produce a masking signal that provided a constant signal-to-noise ratio for the entire utterance. The circuit derives the speech masking signal from the utterance itself by destroying the segmental information although maintaining the instantaneous power spectrum and pitch information of the sentence. Masking output of the circuit was delivered to both ears of a listener while the speech signal was presented to only one ear at a time. This procedure provided an opportunity to examine the effect of speech distortion on the rôle of the two ears in perceiving sentences. Preliminary results indicate significant differences in immediate recall for ears—the right ear being more efficient than the left ear. Results of this pilot study indicate that: (1) differential ear preference is a function of cerebral dominance; and (2) there are differences between the two hemispheres in processing different types of linguistic information on the sentence level.