Discussion

Dichotic listening refers to one’s selective attention to what one hears in one ear over another. In general, studies have found that the right hemisphere of the brain controls the muscles in the left side of the body, and the left hemisphere controls the right side (Cohen et al. 2008). While both hemispheres play important roles in our everyday lives, the left hemisphere, in particular, is essential in interpreting verbal information (Cohen et al. 2008). Therefore, this may have a role in right and left ear dominance when performing dichotic listening tasks.

However, through my dichotic listening task, it appeared that neither ear was more dominant over the other. In general, the participants’ performance in the dichotic listening task showed that there was no significant difference between both ears. On the other hand, the results between the experimental group and control group were significantly different, as the control group performed better than the experimental group and were able to correctly identify all the words on the list. This would merely indicate that when individuals are listening to different recordings in both ears, it would be more difficult to identify words correctly.

It might be important to note that the performance of participants in group A was different from that of group B’s. Results from group A showed that the left ear was more dominant and that this difference was statistically significant. On the other hand, results from group B showed that the right ear was more different. Remember, the words played to the left ear in group A were switched over to the right ear in group B. Therefore, perhaps this might suggest that more attention is paid towards certain words, perhaps words that are more familiar to the participant. Perhaps, in the future, it would be interesting to generate different lists of words for several groups of participants to ensure that this effect is prevented.

Furthermore, if I were to redo my experiment in the future, I would definitely gather more individuals. Since the results of this study did show a slight difference between the performance of the left and right ears, having more participants might be able to confirm whether this difference is significant. My experiments were conducted at school due to the test subjects’ convenience, so there may have been slight noises in the background while the test subjects carried out the task. Although I made sure that the individual being tested was able to work in a calm and quiet environment, I would consider doing the dichotic listening task in a room with soundproof walls, if possible. It may also be helpful to generate longer lists of words to better understand the performance of each individual, or perhaps, a warm-up list prior to the actual conducting of the experiment may allow participants to perform to their best potential.