evaluation of difference in performance of young adults in dichotic digit test in tamil and dichotic consonant vowel test

Background and aim: dichotic listening has been defined as the simultaneous stimulationof both ears and has been used to evaluate a listener’s binaural integration/separation ability.dichotic tests are available in various languages and use varied stimuli. the study aimed toevaluate the differential performance of tamil-speaking young adults in two tests of dichoticperception namely dichotic consonant vowel (dcv) test and dichotic digit test in tamil(ddt-t).methods: sixty adults with normal hearing aged 18 to 35 years were the participants of thestudy. all the young adults were native speakers of the tamil language without significantauditory history. dcv and ddt-t were administered in randomized order at 50 db sl (re:srt) in free recall condition. the participants were instructed to respond orally and theresponses were noted.results: better performance was observed in dichotic digit compared to dcv test for allparticipants. this was attributed to the higher number of cues available in ddt-t. further,error analyses of participants’ responses revealed that voicing errors were higher with thehighest errors in the identification of unvoiced consonant /ta/ in both ears. the reason for thiscould be the lack of contextual cues in dcv test for tamil-speaking individuals to interpret thevoicing feature of a consonant.conclusion: it can be concluded that ddt-t was more useful in assessing binaural integrationability of native tamil speakers compared to dcv. it is recommended to be used in thebehavioral test battery for evaluating auditory processing disorder in native tamil speakers.