Phoneme or Syllable: Monitoring Experiment Materials

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.