Programs to produce high quality dichotic tapes for central auditory testing
✍ Scribed by Michael A. Procter; Curtis W. Ponton; Donald G. Jamieson
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1986
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 820 KB
- Volume
- 19
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0010-4809
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Dichotic stimulation, the simultaneous presentation of two different acoustic signals to the right and left ears, respectively, is used routinely in the clinical assessment of speech lateralization as well as in other central auditory testing procedures in the clinic and laboratory. At present, most researchers and clinicians depend on a few commercial sources for dichotic tapes, because there are a limited number of facilities which are able to produce such tapes. Moreover, some of the commerical tapes currently offered for sale contain important stimulus errors. In the present paper, we describe a general set of programs for the PDP 11 series of computers, which permits sequences of dichotic stimuli to be generated and output with a high degree of precision. These programs therefore allow researchers to generate any desired sequence of dichotic stimulation, for recording and taping, for use in their research. The programs operate in two stages to generate the required dichotic sequences. In the first stage, the constrained random ordering of the stimuli is generated as specified by the user. In the second stage, after the preliminary stimulus preparation has been completed (for example, using a waveform editing package: cf., D. G. Jamieson and D. A. Naugler, Comput. Biomed. Res., 1985,18,480) an audio tape is generated with stimuli presented dichotically, with timing and sequencing precisely as specified. D 1986 Academic Press, Inc. There are a limited number of noninvasive procedures by which human brain function can be studied without risk. One powerful, noninvasive procedure involves dichotic testing-the presentation of two different acoustic signals to the right and left ears, respectively, with precise control of the relative timing and intensity of the signals. Such tests are used routinely in the clinical assessment of speech and language function, as well as in other central auditory testing procedures in the clinic and laboratory. Examples of tests using this type of stimulation include the audiometric assessment of central auditory function (cf., 25) studies of binaural masking (e.g. , 5, 26, 27), studies of "duplex" (auditory/speech) perception (cf., 13, 14, 18), and studies of speech processing (e.g., 7, 8). Perhaps the most widespread example of tests using this type of acoustic stimulation is the dichotic listening test, which is widely used to assess cerebral speech organization, even in normal individuals (cf., 10). In this test, subjects listen to sequences of word pairs. Within each sequence, two or three word