Effects of attention on the phonetic importance of acoustic cues
Peter C. Gordon, Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1988
The effect of attentional capacity on recognizing phonetic segments was studied by having subjects identify synthetic speech sounds while simultaneously performing a visual-manual tracking task. The difficulty of the tracking task was manipulated in order to vary the amount of attention available for speech perception. Within the speech stimuli, acoustic cues to segment identity were manipulated so that trading relations could be assessed under different levels of attention. The relative importance of the acoustic cues to perceptual identification changed, depending on the difficulty of the concurrent tracking task. It appears that acoustic cues that are easily encoded make an increased contribution to phonetic judgments when listeners are unable to pay close attention to a speech sound. In this way, attention to the speech stimulus is similar to other factors (e.g., environmental interference, stage of development, and hearing loss) that also affect the relative contribution of acoustic cues to phonetic perception. It also appears that the initial stages of speech perception can make use of general, modality-independent attentional resources. [Work supported by AFOSR.]