Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Milli Folklor, cilt.10, sa.78, ss.68-74, 2008 (Scopus)
This case study aims at unearthing the cerebral dominance through comprehending "th" /θ/ [dental-dental voiceless slit fricative] and "t" /t/ [alveopalatal voiceless stop] sounds in English words. The target words were given by applying a dichotic listening method. There were 84 (58 female and 26 male) right handed and healthy subjects from the Department of Turkish Folklore, Gazi University, Ankara-Turkey. The subjects are the native speakers of Turkish and whose levels of English were elementary. The students have never been given any systematic instruction of English pronunciation. In order to prepare the dichotic listening sets, 10 English words containing /t/ and 10 English words comprising /θ/ phonemes separately were recorded digitally at 44.100 Hz and 16 bit resolution in mono channel and synchronized by means of professional multi-track recording and editing programs. During the dichotic listening test, the students were given a chart and they were asked to distinguish and mark the primary sound that they heard as "th" /θ/ or "t" /t/ in the recordings of words. The data which was collected from the subjects was digitized to be analyzed in frequency tables of percentages by using a statistics program. It was found that the comprehension of the voiceless "th" /θ/ sound had a higher degree of percentage even though the audio stimuli were given through the left ear and so left auditory pathway. Although the right auditory pathway was not used, the comprehension mechanism of the brain might have given priority to the perception of "th" /θ/ sound as a result of the selective attention system. It can be put forward that unfamiliar phonemes might change selective mechanisms and play an important role on the comprehension of the contralateral stimuli.