If you give me a second to parse what you said, I can reply just fine. If you ask “are you listening?” in an aggravated tone, the buffer gets discarded instantly.

And this is completely orthogonal to whether I was trying to pay attention to your words, cuz I basically can’t process your words directly as you speak anyway.

So I might have an easier time continuing the conversation if I’m mildly distracted instead of constantly overwriting the perfectly understandable stuff from 5 seconds ago with the white noise that I’m hearing in the immediate present.