Attending to what is said or who said it
Kimberly M. Fenn, Howard C. Nusbaum · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2007
Research on selective attention in speech perception has examined how listeners process source information or linguistic information. Much of this work has focused on specifying the boundary conditions under which perceptual processing is limited, and how attention to talker and linguistic information can compete for limited processing resources. In general, listeners can only attend to a single stream of speech, and changing the talker increases demands on attention. The studies that support this claim usually use target detection or speeded classification tasks, activities we seldom engage in during normal conversation which is the protypical form of spoken language use. Is attention to speech as limited in real conversations as it is in stylized laboratory tasks? In a phone survey paradigm, participants engaged in naturalistic conversation rarely detect changes in their interlocutor. Furthermore, when participants expect that a change in interlocutor will occur, they largely believe that they have spoken to two different people even when the same person conducted the entire experiment. During a conversation, attention is directed to speech consistent with listening goals, and perception of a talkers voice is not an automatic consequence of attending the linguistic message.