Differences in the Performance of Older and Younger Adults in a Natural vs. Synthetic Speech Dichotic Listening Task

Abstract

It has been suggested that older adults have more difficulty processing synthetic (computerized) speech than natural speech. One of the reasons for this is that with age, understanding and interpreting speech require additional working memory resources. As synthetic speech is often listened to when one is engaged in an additional task, it is important to understand how adults process and understand it. The impact of synthetic speech to break into attention while shadowing speech, and blocking out an additional stimulus in a dichotic listening task has previously been examined with a younger adult population (Sinatra, Sims, Najle & Chin, 2011). In order to examine if the ability to process unattended stimuli differs with age, the current study has replicated this task and compared the performance of older adults to that of younger. It was found that while younger adults were able to process details and semantic information from unattended audio, older adults were only able to process physical characteristic information, such as pitch. This research suggests that as we age less unattended information (such as the content of an alert) will be processed than when we are younger.