Tune In or Tune Out: Age-Related Differences in Listening to Speech in Music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Brief Objectives: To examine age-related differences in listening to speech in music. Design: In the first experiment, the effect of music familiarity on word identification was compared with a standard measure of word identification in multitalker babble. The average level of the backgrounds was matched and two speech-to-background ratios were tested. In the second experiment, recognition recall was measured for background music heard during a word identification task. Results: For older adults, word identification did not depend on the type of background, but for younger adults word identification was better when the background was familiar music than when it was unfamiliar music or babble. Younger listeners remembered background music better than older listeners, with the pattern of false alarms suggesting that younger listeners consciously processed the background music more than older listeners. In other words, younger listeners attempted to “tune in” the music background, but older listeners attempted to “tune out” the background. Conclusions: These findings reveal age-related differences in listening to speech in music. When older listeners are confronted with a music background they tend to focus attention on the speech foreground. In contrast, younger listeners attend to both the speech foreground and music background. When music is familiar, this strategy adopted by younger listeners seems to be beneficial to word identification. This study examined age-related differences in listening to speech in music. In the first experiment, word identification accuracy was assessed in different background conditions (music or multitalker babble). In the second experiment, recognition recall was measured for background music heard during a word identification task. For older adults, word identification did not depend on the type of background, but for younger adults word identification was better when the background was familiar music than when it was unfamiliar music or babble. The pattern of false alarms in recognition suggested that younger listeners consciously processed the background music more than older listeners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".