In this paper, selectively attentive learning method has been proposed to improve the learning speed of multilayer Perceptron based on the error backpropagation algorithm. Three attention criterions are introduced to effectively determine which set of input patterns is or which portion of network is attended to for effective learning. Such criterions are based on the mean square error function of the output layer and class-selective relevance of the hidden nodes. The acceleration of learning time is achieved by lowering the computational cost per iteration. Effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in a speaker adaptation task of isolated word recognition system. The experimental results show that the proposed selective attention technique can reduce the learning time more than 60% in an average sense.