Dichotic listening performance, cognitive ability, and cerebral organization.

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Abstract
Two dichotic listening tests, one involving recognition of stop consonant-vowel syllables and the other recognition of melodic patterns, were administrated to 120 subjects balanced for handedness, sex, and familial sinistrality. Left-handers were less likely to show a right-ear advantage (REA) on the verbal task than were right-handers, while none of the subject factors affected performance on the musical task. The verbal REA was found to be correlated with psychometric measures of verbal ability, but not with measures of spatial ability. In contrast, the left-ear advantage (LEA) on the musical task was more closely related to spatial ability than to verbal ability. The results indicate an independence of verbal and nonverbal laterality effects and support a modular theory of brain organization rather than one of complementarity.