Speech perception engages a general timer: evidence from a divided attention word identification task.
Time is essential to speech. The duration of speech segments plays a critical role in the perceptual identification of these segments, and therefore in that of spoken words. Here, using a French word identification task, we show that vowels are perceived as shorter when attention is divided between two tasks, as compared to a single task control condition. This temporal underestimation pattern is consistent with attentional models of timing and hence demonstrates that vowel duration is explicitly estimated using a central general-purpose timer.
Casini
Laurence
L
Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Laboratoire de Neurobiologie de la Cognition, Marseille, France. Laurence.Casini@univ-provence.fr
Burle
Boris
B
Nguyen
Noël
N
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult