LAUSR

The purpose of the present study was to identify differences between older and younger listeners in how they use talker consistency and word order cues in both to-be-attended and to-be-ignored streams. A temporally-interleaved method was used in which participants were asked to report the first and then every other word within a stream of sounds, and ignore the intervening sounds. The to-be-attended words were presented in either correct syntactic order (“Anne dropped three old mats”) or in random order (“Six pink Dave zones lost”). The to-be-ignored sounds were either words (in syntactically-correct or random order), steady-state noise, or environmental sounds. When stimuli were words, the talker was either consistent or varied for all five words of the target and/or masker. Preliminary analyses showed that listeners in both groups were only minimally affected by intervening stimuli that were samples of noise or environmental sounds. When the interleaved sounds were words, younger adults were able to tak...