Editing Neurolinguistics (section)

====Active distraction and double-task====
Some experiments give subjects a "distractor" task to ensure that subjects are not consciously paying attention to the experimental stimuli; this may be done to test whether a certain computation in the brain is carried out automatically, regardless of whether the subject devotes [[Attention|attentional resources]] to it.  For example, one study had subjects listen to non-linguistic tones (long beeps and buzzes) in one ear and speech in the other ear, and instructed subjects to press a button when they perceived a change in the tone; this supposedly caused subjects not to pay explicit attention to grammatical violations in the speech stimuli.  The subjects showed a [[Mismatch negativity|mismatch response]] (MMN) anyway, suggesting that the processing of the grammatical errors was happening automatically, regardless of attention<ref name="pulvermulleretal2008"/>&mdash;or at least that subjects were unable to consciously separate their attention from the speech stimuli.

Another related form of experiment is the double-task experiment, in which a subject must perform an extra task (such as sequential finger-tapping or articulating nonsense syllables) while responding to linguistic stimuli; this kind of experiment has been used to investigate the use of [[working memory]] in language processing.<ref name="rogalskyetal">{{cite journal | title=Broca's Area, Sentence Comprehension, and Working Memory: An fMRI Study | last1=Rogalsky | first1=Corianne |author2=William Matchin; Gregory Hickok | journal=[[Frontiers Research Foundation|Frontiers in Human Neuroscience]] | year=2008 | pages=14 | volume=2 | pmid=18958214 | pmc=2572210 | doi=10.3389/neuro.09.014.2008| doi-access=free }}</ref>