Extrinsic cognitive load impairs low-level speech perception

• 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
• ISSN: 1069-9384; 1531-5320
• DOI: 10.3758/s13423-013-0544-7

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.