selective listening

A term derived from the notion of selective attention in psychology, and used in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS to refer to the process whereby people are able to pick out certain aspects of a speech signal and to ignore others. The COCKTAIL PARTY PHENOMENON characterizes the problem – how a person is able to attend selectively to one out of several simultaneously occurring conversations. Analysis of the factors which affect this ability (e.g. the SEMANTIC content of the conversations, the speed of the speech) suggests several conclusions which are of major importance in developing a theory of speech perception – for instance, that CONNECTED SPEECH cannot be perceived as a series of isolated SEGMENTS.