Phoneme or Syllable: Monitoring Experiment Materials
Description
This data comes from a monitoring experiment that explored how listeners shift their attention between phonemes and syllables when the speech signal changes. The study aims to shed light on how listeners prioritize phonemes or syllables as fundamental perceptual units under changing acoustic conditions. Fluctuations in the masking effect serve as an indicator of attention shifts, calculated from the response times (RTs) of first language (L1) and second language (L2) listeners as they listened to pseudo-words in English (Experiment 1) and Mandarin (Experiment 2). Listeners’ attention was deliberately directed to phonemes through two manipulations: an artificial accent as bottom-up information and prior knowledge of the accent as top-down information. Changes in RTs to phoneme and syllable targets were analyzed under these conditions. In Experiment 1 (English), English listeners showed more flexibility in shifting attention than Mandarin listeners, with syllables being more affected than phonemes. Bottom-up cues had a stronger effect than top-down ones. In Experiment 2 (Mandarin), Mandarin listeners showed more stable syllable processing and less flexibility in shifting attention. Overall, syllable processing was more easily disrupted than phoneme processing—especially by distorted bottom-up cues—suggesting that phonemes may be a more reliable unit of perception, particularly in English. The ability to shift attention depends on a listener’s first language and the sound structure of the language being heard.
Files
Steps to reproduce
The materials included in these folders consist of the stimulus sound files and the online experimental scripts used on the Gorilla platform for both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Each experiment included four lists (List A, B, C, and D). The "Sound materials" folder contains the .wav audio stimuli used in the experiments conducted on the Gorilla platform. Each stimulus is also accompanied by a .TextGrid file, which indicates how the offset was determined and where it was cut. The "Gorilla online experiment scripts" folder contains the scripts that were uploaded to the Gorilla platform to run the experiments.
Institutions
- University of Glasgow