Aging effects on the ERP correlates of involuntary attentional capture in speech sound analysis.

In an auditory oddball paradigm, 16 old and 16 young adults were asked to ignore binaurally presented disyllabic speech sounds and to watch a silent movie while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Four types of phonetic deviants occurred on, respectively: (1) the Stressed-First syllable, (2) the Unstressed-First syllable, (3) the Stressed-Second syllable and (4) the Unstressed-Second syllable. The nature of the phonetic change was the same across the four deviants.