Asymmetry in Auditory Function in Elderly Persons

ABSTRACT

Evidence suggesting that aging is related to increasing suppression of the left ear in the dichotic listening paradigm is reviewed. The effect has been demonstrated for digits, words, sentences, and continuous discourse. It is present in both the free-recall and the directed-attention modes, and it cannot be readily ascribed to age-related increase in hearing sensitivity loss. It has been demonstrated both behaviorally, in terms of accuracy scores and reaction times, and electrophysiologically, in terms of the peak latency of the event-related potential recorded from scalp electrodes. Moreover changing the to-be-attended speech feature from linguistic to nonlinguistic can reverse the direction of the suppression effect. Taken as a whole these findings suggest an age-related deficit in the interhemispheric transfer of auditory information via the corpus callosum.

KEYWORD

Dichotic listening - aging - corpus callosum - event-related potentials - left ear suppression

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