Reversal of ear advantage for phonetically similar words in illiterates

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Abstract
A dichotic listening task consisting of pairs of phonetically “similar” meaningful words (differing in one consonant phoneme only) was given to subjects of different educational levels and reading and writing abilities. Illiterate subjects and subjects with only elementary education and poor reading and writing habits failed to show a right ear advantage (REA) and demonstrated a tendency towards left ear advantage (LEA), while literate subjects exhibited a pattern of REA. By contrast, when markedly “dissimilar” words were used, all subjects showed the classic REA.