This study investigated the development of selective auditory attention skills of 53 children aged 5 through 9 yr. old. Each child was tested individually via headphones at a comfortable listening level. The task required pointing to the appropriate picture of a monosyllabic word presented diotically. The task was presented first in quiet and then under each of three noise (distractor) conditions, white noise (nonlinguistic), speech backwards (linguistic nonsemantic), and speech forward (semantic). Age and type of distractor significantly influenced test scores. The semantic distractor caused the greatest distraction for all children.
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