Influence of Alignment Strategies and Consonant Acoustic Features on Laterality Index in Dichotic Testing in Indian Languages.

Background: The right ear advantage (REA) observed for dichotic CV (DCV) testing in Indian languages is seen to be smaller compared with the observations in several studies in English and other languages.

Purpose: The present study aims to explore whether the differences in the temporal alignment of consonant-vowel (CV) stimuli used for the dichotic task is a contributing factor that can explain the smaller REAs observed in Indian languages.

Research Design: The study compared the laterality index (LI) values between DCV test results obtained using CV stimuli that were temporally aligned at the acoustic onset versus the burst onset, with 0 milliseconds lag between the right and left ears.