It was reasoned that if the right ear/left brain hemisphere is more efficient than the left ear/right hemisphere at extracting the meaning of a sentence, then verbatim information presented to the right ear may be more difficult to retrieve than verbatim information presented to the left ear immediately after the sentence is heard. This idea was tested on 64 college students with normal hearing, using a Sternberg item-recognition task. Results indicated that sentences presented to the right ear did produce a longer recognition latency than sentences presented to the left ear. The faster left ear response occurred with both a manual and a spoken response. These results were interpreted as support for greater "depth of processing" by the right ear/dominant hemisphere than the left ear/minor hemisphere. (Author/RL)