Extrinsic cognitive load impairs low-level speech perception

Recent research has suggested that the extrinsic cognitive load generated by performing a nonlinguistic visual task while perceiving speech increases listeners’ reliance on lexical knowledge and decreases their capacity to perceive phonetic detail. In the present study, we asked whether this effect...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychonomic bulletin & review 2014-06, Vol.21 (3), p.748-754
Main Authors: Mattys, Sven L., Barden, Katharine, Samuel, Arthur G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activity levels. Psychomotricity
Adolescent
Adult
Attention - physiology
Automobile industry
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Brief Report
Cognitive Psychology
Computer industry
Experiments
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Influence
Language
Male
Memory
Noise
Phonetics
Production and perception of spoken language
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Speech Perception - physiology
Studies
Vigilance. Attention. Sleep
Visual Perception - physiology
Voice response technology
Young Adult
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Summary:Recent research has suggested that the extrinsic cognitive load generated by performing a nonlinguistic visual task while perceiving speech increases listeners’ reliance on lexical knowledge and decreases their capacity to perceive phonetic detail. In the present study, we asked whether this effect is accounted for better at a lexical or a sublexical level. The former would imply that cognitive load directly affects lexical activation but not perceptual sensitivity; the latter would imply that increased lexical reliance under cognitive load is only a secondary consequence of imprecise or incomplete phonetic encoding. Using the phoneme restoration paradigm, we showed that perceptual sensitivity decreases (i.e., phoneme restoration increases) almost linearly with the effort involved in the concurrent visual task. However, cognitive load had only a minimal effect on the contribution of lexical information to phoneme restoration. We concluded that the locus of extrinsic cognitive load on the speech system is perceptual rather than lexical. Mechanisms by which cognitive load increases tolerance to acoustic imprecision and broadens phonemic categories were discussed.
ISSN:1069-9384
1531-5320
DOI:10.3758/s13423-013-0544-7