Increased Left-hemisphere Contribution to Native- versus Foreign-language Talker Identification Revealed by Dichotic Listening

Previous studies of human listeners’ ability to identify speakers by voice have revealed a reliable language-familiarity effect: Listeners are better at identifying voices when they can understand the language being spoken. It has been claimed that talker identification is facilitated in a familiar language because of functional integration between the cognitive systems underlying speech and voice perception. However, prior studies have not provided specific evidence demonstrating neural integration between these two systems. Using dichotic listening as a means to assess the role of each hemisphere in talker identification, we show that listeners’ right-, but not left-, ear (lefthemisphere) performance better predicts overall accuracy in their native than non-native language. By demonstrating functional integration of speech perception regions (classical left-hemisphere language areas) in a talker identification task, we provide evidence for a neurologic basis underlying the language-familiarity effect.