Multitasking during degraded speech recognition in school-age children

Tina M. Grieco-Calub*, Kristina M. Ward, Laurel Brehm

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multitasking requires individuals to allocate their cognitive resources across different tasks. The purpose of the current study was to assess school-age children's multitasking abilities during degraded speech recognition. Children (8 to 12 years old) completed a dual-task paradigm including a sentence recognition (primary) task containing speech that was either unprocessed or noise-band vocoded with 8, 6, or 4 spectral channels and a visual monitoring (secondary) task. Children's accuracy and reaction time on the visual monitoring task was quantified during the dual-task paradigm in each condition of the primary task and compared with single-task performance. Children experienced dual-task costs in the 6- and 4-channel conditions of the primary speech recognition task with decreased accuracy on the visual monitoring task relative to baseline performance. In all conditions, children's dual-task performance on the visual monitoring task was strongly predicted by their single-task (baseline) performance on the task. Results suggest that children's proficiency with the secondary task contributes to the magnitude of dual-task costs while multitasking during degraded speech recognition.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1-14
Number of pages14
JournalTrends in Hearing
Volume21
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017

Keywords

  • Children
  • Multitasking
  • Noise-band vocoding
  • Speech recognition
  • Task performance

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Otorhinolaryngology
  • Speech and Hearing

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