Semantic processing of unattended speech in dichotic listening.

This study investigated whether unattended speech is processed at a semantic level in dichotic listening using a semantic priming paradigm. A lexical decision task was administered in which target words were presented in the attended auditory channel, preceded by two prime words presented simultaneously in the attended and unattended channels, respectively. Both attended and unattended primes were either semantically related or unrelated to the attended targets.