| The following study examined the influence of verbal implicit cues on perception of auditory stimuli among patients suffering a lesion of the right hemisphere and auditory neglect of sound perceived by the left ear (N = 16). Because the language centers are intact among these patients, it was hypothesized that certain verbal stimuli presented dichotically would attenuate neglect phenomena. The selected patients were administered an experimental dichotic listening test comprised of six types of word-pairs, including unrelated word pairs, synonyms, antonyms, categorically related words, compound words, and rhyming words. Words that were semantically related, such as synonyms, antonyms, categorically related words, and compound words were more accurately perceived than unrelated words. Rhyming words were less accurately perceived than unrelated words. These findings suggest that the perception and awareness of auditory information is strongly affected by the specific content conveyed by the auditory system. Language centers will process a degraded stimulus that contains salient language related content. In general, these findings suggest that auditory neglect phenomena involve a complex interaction of intact and impaired processing centers in the brain with content that is selectively processed by these centers. |
