Auditory selective attention (ASA) refers to the mental ability to resist distractors and to focus on a specific sound in a complex acoustic environment. Revealing the factors that affect people’s ASA can help to improve student’s learning environment. Thus, studies have been conducted both in real life and virtual reality (VR) environments. This study aimed to make a further step to the real life, thus short acoustic stimuli used by a previous study were extend to complex acoustic stimuli, and the impact of different variables on the ASA of the participants were analyzed. The complex stimuli both for targets and distractors were spoken sentences with animal names as focus word in different position in the sentences. The experiment was conducted in a VR environment, and 20 adults participated in the experiment. The results showed that the position of the focus word in the target stimulus had a significant effect on the reaction time, while the impact of the distractor on the reaction times or error rates was not significant; however there was a trend to longer reaction times and lower error rates when the focus word in the distractor appeared later than in the target stimulus. This study proved that it is feasible to conduct an ASA experiment in a virtual reality classroom with complex stimuli.

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