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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 unpro-
cessed 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.
