Overcoming the right-ear advantage: a study of focused attention in children

Several studies indicate that normal right-handed children of various ages show a right-ear advantage (REA) for dichotic verbal stimuli even when instructed to attend to the left ear. Other evidence, however, suggests that selective listening ability begins to develop in early childhood and that children reliably can overcome the REA by the age of 8 or 9 years. We used a signal detection procedure to address this apparent contradiction. In the first of two experiments, 58 children in two age groups (M = 7 and 10 years) were able to overcome the REA for dichotic consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli when instructed to focus attention on the left ear. Success in detecting and localizing signals from the left ear, as reflected in hit rates, was independent of age and reading level. A second experiment, in which strings of dichotic monosyllabic words were presented to 56 children at the same two age levels, yielded similar results. These findings challenge the claim that ability to overcome the REA when attending to the left ear reflects an abnormality of cerebral functioning.