Multitasking During Degraded Speech Recognition in School-Age Children.
Tina M Grieco-Calub, Kristina M Ward, Laurel Brehm
PMID 28105890WHAT IT FOUND
When children listened to degraded speech, their accuracy on a visual monitoring task fell.
Reaction time did not slow. Children who were better at the visual task alone held up better.
Key findings
01In 27 children with normal hearing, speech recognition accuracy declined as spectral fidelity decreased, but it did not differ between single-task and dual-task performance.
02In the dual-task conditions, visual monitoring accuracy differed from baseline in the 6-channel and 4-channel conditions, but reaction time did not change across conditions.
03Baseline accuracy on the visual monitoring task predicted secondary-task accuracy in degraded dual-task conditions, and age and Flanker score did not add beyond it.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study tested 27 children with normal hearing, so it does not show what happens for children with hearing loss or other clinical conditions. The degraded speech was noise-band vocoded, which is not a typical listening experience for children. The session was laboratory-based, with one child in a sound booth, not a classroom or everyday environment. Only the Flanker task was used to measure executive function. After training in the most degraded familiarization condition, 4 children scored between 40% and 50% and 1 child scored 12.5%, but all children were included. Baseline accuracy on the visual monitoring task predicted secondary-task accuracy, but a large amount of variance remained unexplained. The visual monitoring task may have been too easy for some children, which could limit sensitivity to small changes in speech recognition accuracy. Results may not generalize to speech degraded by background noise or speech babble, or to secondary tasks that overlap more with speech recognition.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that degraded speech has no cost because children's visual reaction time stayed the same. The decline was in accuracy on the secondary task, not in speed of response.