Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Neuropsychologia. 2011 Oct;49(12):3512-6. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.08.014. Epub 2011 Aug 19.
Event-related potential (ERP) evidence indicates that listeners selectively attend to word onsets in continuous speech, but the reason for this preferential processing is unknown. The current study measured ERPs elicited by syllable onsets in an artificial language to test the hypothesis that listeners direct attention to word onsets because their identity is unpredictable. Both before and after recognition training, participants listened to a continuous stream of six nonsense words arranged in pairs, such that the second word in each pair was completely predictable. After training, first words in pairs elicited a larger negativity beginning around 100 ms after onset. This effect was not evident for the completely predictable second words in pairs. These results suggest that listeners are most likely to attend to the segments in speech that they are least able to predict.
事件相关电位（ERP）的证据表明，听众在连续的语音中选择性地关注词的开头，但这种优先处理的原因尚不清楚。本研究通过人工语言中的音节开头来测量 ERP，以检验这样一种假设，即听众将注意力集中在词的开头，是因为它们的身份是不可预测的。在识别训练之前和之后，参与者都听了一连串的六个无意义的单词，这些单词两两排列，使得每对中的第二个单词是完全可预测的。在训练之后，每对中的第一个单词在开头后大约 100 毫秒时引发一个更大的负向波。对于完全可预测的第二对单词，这种效果并不明显。这些结果表明，听众最有可能关注他们最不容易预测的语音片段。
