Cognitive load does not increase reliance on speaker information in phonetic categorization

Abstract

Past research on speech perception has shown that speaker information, such as gender, affects phoneme categorization. Additionally, studies on listening under divided attention have argued that cognitive load decreases attention to phonetic detail and increases reliance on higher-level cues such as lexical information. This study examines the processing of speaker information under divided attention. The results of two perception experiments indicate that additional cognitive load does not increase listeners’ reliance on the gender of the speaker during phoneme categorization tasks. This suggests that the processing of speaker information may pattern with lower-level acoustic rather than higher-level lexical information.