Distal context rate effects attenuated by attention

Listeners use the rate of speech at the beginning of a sentence to segment ambiguous words that occur later in a sentence. For instance, the sentence “the drab mermaids will join the clean medics smoothly” can also be perceived as ending with “medic smoothly” if the words at the sentence onset are slowed down, showing the effects of what has been termed distal context rate. Here, I report a set of studies that assess the extent to which distal context effects are subject to modulation by attention. We manipulated two types of attention: explicit attention (in the form of overt task instructions) and implicit attention (employing unnatural F0 contours to attract or distract). These were designed to focus listeners on or divert listeners from the word segmentation ambiguities present in the signal. The findings suggest that listeners who were cued to attend more to the word segmentation ambiguities were less affected by distal context effects than listeners who were cued to shift their attention away. This suggests that listeners who were cued to apply more “perception-oriented” attention (cf. McAuliffe and Babel, 2016) to experimental items may be less affected by context speech rate than those cued otherwise.