Cognition and Perception Commons^™

The Role Of Top-Down Attention In Statistical Learning Of Speech, Stacey Reyes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Statistical learning (SL) refers to the ability to extract regularities in the environment and has been well-documented to play a key role in speech segmentation and language acquisition. Whether SL is automatic or requires top-down attention is an unresolved question, with conflicting results in the literature. The current proposal tests whether SL can occur outside the focus of attention. Participants either focused towards, or diverted their attention away from an auditory speech stream made of repeating nonsense trisyllabic words. Divided-attention participants either performed a concurrent visual task or a language-related task during exposure to the nonsense speech stream, while control …