Unattended speech processing: Effect of vocal tract length

Rivenez et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119(6), 4027¿4040 (2006)] recently demonstrated that an unattended message is able to prime by 28 ms a simultaneously presented attended message when the two messages have a different F0 range. This study asks whether a difference in vocal tract length between the two messages rather than a difference in F0 can also produce such priming. A priming effect of 13 ms was found when messages were in the same F0 range but had different (15-30%) formant frequencies suggesting that the processing of unattended speech strongly relies on the presence of perceptual grouping cues.