Effects of Age and Hearing Sensitivity on the Use of Prosodic Information in Spoken Word Recognition

Abstract

It is well known that spoken words can often be recognized from just their onsets and that older adults require a greater word onset duration for recognition than young adults. In this study, young and older adults heard either just word onsets, word onsets followed by white noise indicating the full duration of the target word, or word onsets followed by a low-pass-filtered signal that indicated the number of syllables and syllabic stress (word prosody) in the absence of segmental information. Older adults required longer stimulus durations for word recognition under all conditions, with age differences in hearing sensitivity contributing significantly to this age difference. Within this difference, however, word recognition was facilitated by knowledge of word prosody to the same degree for young and older adults. These findings suggest, first, that listeners can detect and utilize word stress in making perceptual judgments and, second, that this ability remains spared in normal aging.

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).…”

“…Older adults are poor at judging sound duration (Ostroff, McDonald, Schneider & Alain, 2003), are badly affected by background noise (Schneider, Daneman, Murphy & Kwong-See, 2000), and their hearing sensitivity loss also affects their ability to use linguistic prosody in word recognition (Wingfield et al, 2000). Hearing loss in older adults therefore has potential to artificially inflate emotional prosodic processing deficits.…”

Age-related changes in consonant and sentence processing

“…Vowel identification is well preserved in mild hearing loss [50] and largely unaffected by age [51]. In addition, ONH subjects are also as good as YNH subjects at extracting prosodic cues [52] and may be better at processing contextual cues than YNH subjects [1]. Our results suggest that ONH subjects are better than YNH subjects at extracting context from the sentences materials used in the QuickSIN and HINT.…”

Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier

“…When discrimination of consonants is made difficult by artificially varying speech stimuli along continua so that it is hard to decide whether one is hearing digress or tigress, the perceived boundary between categories is sensitive to the placement of syllabic stress; this effect is stronger in old than in young adults, to the extent that metrical structure may override voice onset time as a cue for phonemic boundaries (Baum, 2003). Older adults also need more information, i.e., greater word onset duration (or gate), than young adults to recognize spoken words, but word recognition is facilitated to the same extent across age by adding prosodic information indicating number of syllables and syllabic stress (Wingfield, Lindfield, & Goodglass, 2000). Rapid auditory presentation of sentences with list intonation rather than normal prosody produces repetition deafness, namely failure to report repeated words (contrast I live at one two two four Canyon Street with I live at one five two four Canyon Street).…”