Attention, task demands, and multitalker processing costs in speech perception

Determining how human listeners achieve phonetic constancy despite a variable mapping between the acoustics of speech and phonemic categories is the longest standing challenge in speech perception. A clue comes from studies where the talker changes randomly between stimuli, which slows processing compared with a single-talker baseline. These multitalker processing costs have been observed most often in speeded monitoring paradigms, where participants respond whenever a specific item occurs. Notably, the conventional paradigm imposes attentional demands via two forms of varied mapping in mixed-talker conditions. First, target recycling (i.e., allowing items to serve as targets on some trials but as distractors on others) potentially prevents the development of task automaticity. Second, in mixed trials, participants must respond to two unique stimuli (i.e., one target produced by each talker), whereas in blocked conditions, they need respond to only one token (i.e., multiple target tokens). We seek to understand how attentional demands influence talker normalization, as measured by multitalker processing costs. Across four experiments, multitalker processing costs persisted when target recycling was not allowed but diminished when only one stimulus served as the target on mixed trials. We discuss the logic of using varied mapping to elicit attentional effects and implications for theories of speech perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).