Noob Trying to Program Auditory n-back task

[Shawn Byron Beckett]

Hello, I am a complete E-Prime neophyte (a summer student), and so could use a bit of help to point me in the right direction.

My experiment is composed of two (simultaneously presented) activities, to study the effects of divided attention:

1)

I am trying to run an auditory 2-back task, where the Subject hears words belonging to different categories (e.g. ANIMALS, FRUIT, JOBS) at a specific rate (e.g. 1 word every 2 seconds).  If they hear a word from the same category as the one presented 2 prior, they hit "Yes." Otherwise, they hit "No." 

For example, the sequence [WORD(correct response)]:

COW(no) DOG(no) PEAR(no) LAWYER(no) BANANA(yes) PLUMBER(yes) NURSE(no)

In this sequence, "banana" and "plumber" are both preceded 2 back by other items ("pear" and "lawyer" respectively) that belong to their same categories.

2)

The difficulty with this is that I am going to have another task running at the same time, which is a visual task that is also presented in E-Prime. The Subject will have to discriminate between large and small objects on-screen, in which the correct answer must be given before progress can occur. The length of time that the Subject will be performing this task will be set by the length of time allotted to the auditory task above. So the whole procedure will be over in say, 1 minute.

I am not sure how to model these, since they are two different tasks, ostensibly running on two machines, that would need to be syncronized so that they start and stop at the same time. Any ideas on how/if this is possible would be very helpful!!

Thank you,

Shawn