Influence of pre-voicing duration on dichotic performance.

When two speech messages are presented to normal subjects in a dichotic listening task, the stimuli presented to the right ear are generally reported first and more accurately than signals presented to the left ear. Although a normal Italian speaker produces approximately 100 ms of pre-voicing, we found that the maximum dichotic interference (shown by a slightly larger right-ear advantage and fewer double-correct trials) occurred for stimuli with 30-ms pre-voicing. These data indicate that the duration of pre-voicing is important for intelligibility of Italian stop consonants.