Listening to Speech at Two Levels at Once

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Abstract
Monitoring performance was compared when subjects were asked to listen simultaneously for two different targets embedded in a sentence and when they listened only for one. The effects of different combinations of targets (phonemes, words, or meanings) were investigated and an attempt was made to separate the effects of particular combinations from the effects of difficulty of the two component targets. Performance was worse when either of two targets might occur than when subjects knew which single type to listen for. However there were no differences attributable to which particular types of targets were being combined. Listening for a phonemic target was as difficult to combine with listening for a semantic target as for another phonemic target. The result is consistent with a central speech analysing system whose limited processing capacity must be shared (at least in this monitoring task) both between and within all relevant levels of linguistic analysis, rather than with relatively independent subsystems for each type of listening.