Temporal contrast effects in human speech perception are immune to selective attention

Abstract

Two fundamental properties of perception are selective attention and perceptual contrast, but how these two processes interact remains unknown. Does an attended stimulus history exert a larger contrastive influence on the perception of a following target than unattended stimuli? Dutch listeners categorized target sounds with a reduced prefix “ge-” marking tense (e.g., ambiguous between gegaan-gaan “gone-go”). In ‘single talker’ Experiments 1–2, participants perceived the reduced syllable (reporting gegaan) when the target was heard after a fast sentence, but not after a slow sentence (reporting gaan). In ‘selective attention’ Experiments 3–5, participants listened to two simultaneous sentences from two different talkers, followed by the same target sounds, with instructions to attend only one of the two talkers. Critically, the speech rates of attended and unattended talkers were found to equally influence target perception – even when participants could watch the attended talker speak. In fact, participants’ target perception in ‘selective attention’ Experiments 3–5 did not differ from participants who were explicitly instructed to divide their attention equally across the two talkers (Experiment 6). This suggests that contrast effects of speech rate are immune to selective attention, largely operating prior to attentional stream segregation in the auditory processing hierarchy.

Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear

“…the null effect in [36]). Moreover, other behavioural consequences beyond lexical stress perception could likely be implicated, ranging from phase-resetting neural oscillations [26] with consequences for speech intelligibility and phoneme identification [50,51], to facilitating selective attention in 'cocktail party' listening, word segmentation and word learning [52][53][54][55].…”

Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear

“…impact what speech sounds we hear. Moreover, other behavioral consequences beyond lexical stress perception could be implicated, ranging from phase-resetting neural oscillations 44 with consequences for speech intelligibility and phoneme identification 75,76 , to facilitating selective attention in 'cocktail party' listening [77][78][79] , word segmentation 80 , and word learning 81 .…”

Using fuzzy string matching for automated assessment of listener transcripts in speech intelligibility studies

“…The material involved semantically ordinary Dutch sentences, ranging from 11 to 26 syllables, and from 5 to 20 words in length. Although not particularly relevant for our present purposes, note that sentences were manipulated in their speech rate (Bosker et al, 2020b) or first formant frequency (Bosker et al, 2020a), affecting the perception of a sentence-final target word. After first categorizing the sentence-final target word, participants were instructed to type out the sentence produced by the attended talker.…”