ATTENTIONAL ALLOCATION DURING SPEECH-PERCEPTION - HOW FINE IS THE FOCUS

A variant of the phoneme monitoring task was developed to investigate temporal selective attention during speech processing. In this version of the task the probable location of the target phoneme to be monitored for was varied to induce subjects to attend more closely to one location than to others. Experiments 1 and 2 examined selective attention under normal listening conditions, and Experiment 3 investigated attention under more difficult monitoring conditions. Overall, the data indicate that temporal selective attention is very flexible and precise: Benefits in performance were obtained at the attended location, and costs were observed at the unattended locations. Imposing extra processing demands on the subjects resulted in a loss of attentional selectivity under some circumstances. The implications of these results for issues concerning prelexical processing are also discussed. © 1990.