The role of the right hemisphere in contextual inference

The present report describes two experiments involving dichotic presentation of sentences which have been electronically altered to render all verbal content indecipherable while leaving the melodic structure of the sentences intact. In both experiments, right-handed subjects produced a significant left ear advantage in identifying the situational context portrayed by the sentences. Left-handers produced no significant ear differences. The left ear advantage on this task was unrelated to the direction or magnitude of subject's ear advantage on a standard CV dichotic task.