title: Multitasking During Degraded Speech Recognition in School-Age Children.
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.
authors.affiliation: 1 The Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.|2 Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Tina M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Grieco-Calub
authors.affiliation: 1 The Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Kristina M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Ward
authors.affiliation: 3 Linguistics Department, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
authors.forename: Laurel
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Brehm
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000367:Age Factors; D001288:Attention; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D000073456:Multitasking Behavior; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013997:Time Factors; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: children; multitasking; noise-band vocoding; speech recognition; task performance