Attentional influences on cue weighting in vowel perception: Examining prosodic prominence and informational masking

Beyond sources of listener-external variability such as variation in talker and acoustic context, listener-internal variation also plays a role in speech perception and cue weighting. The present study examines the effects of prosodic prominence, signalled by F0, and multi-talker babble noise as methods of boosting and decrementing listeners’ attention, respectively. Listeners categorized four English vowel contrasts, including two high vowel contrasts and two non-high vowel contrasts, with both formant cues and vowel duration varying along a continuum. In Experiment 1, results showed that prominence boosted formant cue usage, whereas babble noise was detrimental to formant cue usage, aligning with predicted roles in modulating listener attention. Listeners’ use of vowel duration, a secondary cue to the contrasts, was also impacted by prominence or babble noise. In Experiment 2, two methods of eliciting F0-based prominence, off-target (contextual) and on-target (target-internal), were investigated. Results showed that off-target prominence showed a very limited effect in boosting formant cue usage. Results are discussed in terms of the role of prosodic prominence in speech perception, and the role of attention in perceptual processing.