Attention Differentially Affects Acoustic and Phonetic Feature Encoding in a Multispeaker Environment

Humans have the remarkable ability to selectively focus on a single talker in the midst of other competing talkers. The neural mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon remain incompletely understood. In particular, there has been longstanding debate over whether attention operates at an early or late stage in the speech processing hierarchy. One way to better understand this is to examine how attention might differentially affect neurophysiological indices of hierarchical acoustic and linguistic speech representations. In this study, we do this by using encoding models to identify neural correlates of speech processing at various levels of representation. Specifically, we recorded EEG from fourteen human subjects (nine female and five male) during a “cocktail party” attention experiment. Model comparisons based on these data revealed phonetic feature processing for attended, but not unattended speech. Furthermore, we show that attention specifically enhances isolated indices of phonetic feature processing, but that such attention effects are not apparent for isolated measures of acoustic processing. These results provide new insights into the effects of attention on different prelexical representations of speech, insights that complement recent anatomic accounts of the hierarchical encoding of attended speech. Furthermore, our findings support the notion that, for attended speech, phonetic features are processed as a distinct stage, separate from the processing of the speech acoustics. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans are very good at paying attention to one speaker in an environment with multiple speakers. However, the details of how attended and unattended speech are processed differently by the brain is not completely clear. Here, we explore how attention affects the processing of the acoustic sounds of speech as well as the mapping of those sounds onto categorical phonetic features. We find evidence of categorical phonetic feature processing for attended, but not unattended speech. Furthermore, we find evidence that categorical phonetic feature processing is enhanced by attention, but acoustic processing is not. These findings add an important new layer in our understanding of how the human brain solves the cocktail party problem.