Attentional effects of variability in phonetic context
Howard C. Nusbaum, Alexander L. Francis · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1998
Understanding how listeners cope with variability in the acoustic patterns of phonetic categories is a basic theoretical problem. Our previous research has suggested that talker and speaking rate variation slows phoneme recognition and increases cognitive load whereas amplitude variation does not. The present study examines the effect of varying phonetic context. Previous research has shown that varying phonetic context slows phoneme recognition. Using the same method as in our previous studies, we also found recognition slows when there is variation in phonetic context. In a second study, cognitive load was manipulated using a number recall task with lists varying in length. Consonant recognition performance was measured with a constant vowel context and when vowel context varied. Both conditions were tested with a low cognitive load and a high cognitive load. Our previous experiments demonstrated that talker and rate variability interact with cognitive load to slow phonetic recognition. The results of the present study will be compared with the results of prior work on talker and rate variabilty. The implications of these findings for the role of attention in theories of speech perception will be discussed.