Adult Age Differences in the Use of Prosody for Syntactic Parsing and Recall of Spoken Sentences

Abstract

In this experiment, young and elderly adults listened to and recalled sentences that were varied in speech rate through computer-controlled time compression. Half of the sentences at each speech rate were presented with a normal prosodic pattern that reinforced the lexically defined syntactic structure of the sentences, and half were presented with a prosodic contour that conflicted with that structure. Both young and elderly subjects showed better recall for slower speech rates and when prosody was consistent with syntactic structure, but these effects were larger for elderly subjects. When syntax and prosody were placed in conflict, elderly subjects were more likely than the young to reconstruct the lexical content of the presented sentences to produce responses with a syntactic structure consistent with the prosody marking. Although elderly adults may be disadvantaged by rapid speech input rates, we show that they rely on normal prosody to aid syntactic parsing as a step toward language comprehension.

Phonetics in Second Language Acquisition: An Acoustic Study of Fluency in Adult Learners of Spanish

“…Of course, there are other curriculum components, of extra linguistic nature, such as administrative organization, and the pedagogical orientation of instructors, that would help students further improve their fluency. In my opinion, however, based on the present acoustic analysis, and borrowing information from a series of studies by Wingfield et al (1989;1992;1994), language curriculum for adults needs to provide a means for the development of strategies that use prosody. Thus, given that adults resort to prosody to compensate for a lack of auditory perception of segments, it is natural to assume that a curriculum for adults needs to provide adequate conditions for the development of this strategy.…”

“…On the other hand, it is also true that Canadians have a preparation in learning foreign languages that is different from that of Americans. More recently, a series of studies by Wingfield et al (1989;1992;1994) points out that adult learners use prosody to compensate for a possible perceptual loss of segment acquisition. Adults, then, are not at disadvantage, but rather they resort to different strategies to overcome obstacles that they may face in the learning process.…”

The Effect of Dynamic Pitch on Speech Recognition in Temporally Modulated Noise

“…First, because older listeners have poorer speech-in-noise performance in general, any extra perceptual cues that may be redundant for younger listeners could make a difference for the older listeners to process speech better. Second, there is evidence showing that older listeners use prosody more than younger listeners for sentence comprehension in quiet (Wingfield, Wayland, & Stine, 1992). Therefore, enhanced pitch may be particularly helpful for older listeners to process language and recognize speech.…”

Age-related decline in the ability to decode emotional prosody: Primary or secondary phenomenon?

“…When the semantic information was masked by low-pass filtering, older adults' performance fell significantly below that of young adults. Interestingly, in non-emotion language tasks such as running memory for speech, spoken word recognition and syntactic parsing, older adults seem to rely more than young adults on prosodic information, and when it is available, their performance is more comparable to that of young adults (Wingfield, Lahar & Stine, 1989;Wingfield, Lindfield & Goodglass, 2000;Wingfield, Wayland & Stine, 1992).…”