Developmental Course of Auditory Processing Interactions: Garner Interference and Simon Interference

Previous research suggests that with increasing age children become more efficient in inhibiting conflicting responses and in resisting interference from irrelevant information. We assessed the abilities of 100 children (ages 3–16 years) and 20 adults to resist interference during the processing of 2 auditory dimensions of speech, namely the speaker's gender and spatial location. The degree of interference from irrelevent variability in either dimension did not vary with age. Apparently, young children do not have more difficulty in resisting interference when the nontarget and the target are both perceptual attributes. We also assessed the participants' abilities to inhibit conflicting task-irrelevant information from spatial location and to resist interference from spatial variability in the context of conflict. In the presence of conflicting task-irrelevant information, both interference effects declined significantly with age. Developmental change in auditory processing seems to vary as a function of (1) the nature of the target–nontarget combination and (2) the presence/absence of conflicting task-irrelevant information.