Listening to Fast Speech: Aging and Sentence Context (original) (raw)
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Comprehension of time-compressed speech: effects of age and speech complexity
PubMed, 1996
The periodic sampling method of time compression is characterized by periodic removal of segments of speech according to predetermined compression rate (CR) and discard interval length (DIL). Fifteen middle-aged (42-54 years old) and 15 older (60-69 years old) adults participated in the study that assessed the combined effects of CR and DIL on the comprehension of time-compressed speech by aging adults. Three CRs (30, 45, and 60%), seven DILs (35 through 155 msec), and two types of speech materials were used. The subject's task was to report associations among the items mentioned in a time-compressed passage. In all cases, performance of the subjects deteriorated with increasing CR and DIL. The older adults were affected more by CR and DIL values than middle-aged adults. The difference in sentence complexity between the two speech materials affected both groups equally. In general, the results of the study indicated that (a) time-compressed speech differentiates between speech comprehension by middle-aged and older adults and (b) the effects of CR and DIL became more independent with increasing age of the listener and increasing complexity of the speech material. Reported results support the concept that time-compressed speech may be an effective signal in clinical assessment of adults whose auditory complaints are not explained by their peripheral hearing losses.
Aging and the use of context in ambiguity resolution: Complex changes from simple slowing
Cognitive science, 2006
Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good context use in offline tasks, but only young adults demonstrated rapid use of context in cross-modal naming. A 3rd experiment demonstrated that younger and older adults had similar knowledge about the contexts used in Experiments 1 and 2. The experiment results were simulated in 2 computational models in which different patterns of context use were shown to emerge from varying a single speed parameter. These results suggest that age-related changes in processing efficiency can modulate context use during language comprehension.
Sources of Age-Related Recognition Difficulty for Time-Compressed Speech
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2001
Older people frequently show poorer recognition of rapid speech or time-compressed speech than younger listeners. The present investigation sought to determine if the age-related problem in recognition of time-compressed speech could be attributed primarily to a decline in the speed of information processing or to a decline in processing brief acoustic cues. The role of the availability of linguistic cues on recognition performance was examined also. Younger and older listeners with normal hearing and with hearing loss participated in the experiments. Stimuli were sentences, linguistic phrases, and strings of random words that were unmodified in duration or were time compressed with uniform time compression or with selective time compression of consonants, vowels, or pauses. Age effects were observed for recognition of unmodified random words, but not for sentences and linguistic phrases. Analysis of difference scores (unmodified speech versus time-compressed speech) showed age effe...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014
This study investigated whether recognition of timecompressed speech predicts recognition of natural fast-rate speech, and whether this relationship is influenced by listener age. High and low context sentences were presented to younger and older normal-hearing adults at a normal speech rate, naturally fast speech rate, and fast rate implemented by time compressing the normal-rate sentences. Recognition of time-compressed sentences overestimated recognition of natural fast sentences for both groups, especially for older listeners. The findings suggest that older listeners are at a much greater disadvantage when listening to natural fast speech than would be predicted by recognition performance for time-compressed speech.
Word recognition: Age Differences in contextual faclitation effects
Three experiments compared contextual facilitation of word recognition in 48 old (63–80 yrs of age) and 48 young (19–34 yrs of age) Ss. Visual word recognition was examined in a lexical decision task. Sentence contexts or no context preceded words or nonwords. Both groups responded faster when context was supplied. For high predictability words, there was no age difference in the magnitude of the contextual facilitation effect. For low predictability words and nonwords, the old showed greater contextual facilitation than the young. Auditory word recognition was tested with target words spoken with or without sentence context in a background of white noise. Old Ss, again, showed superior contextual facilitation. It is concluded that old people compensate for deterioration in stimulus quality by more effective use of contextual information. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
Working memory affects older adults’ use of context in spoken-word recognition
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2014
Many older listeners report difficulties in understanding speech in noisy situations. Working memory and other cognitive skills may modulate older listeners' ability to use context information to alleviate the effects of noise on spoken-word recognition. In the present study, we investigated whether verbal working memory predicts older adults' ability to immediately use context information in the recognition of words embedded in sentences, presented in different listening conditions. In a phoneme-monitoring task, older adults were asked to detect as fast and as accurately as possible target phonemes in sentences spoken by a target speaker. Target speech was presented without noise, with fluctuating speech-shaped noise, or with competing speech from a single distractor speaker. The gradient measure of contextual probability (derived from a separate offline rating study) affected the speed of recognition. Contextual facilitation was modulated by older listeners' verbal working memory (measured with a backward digit span task) and age across listening conditions. Working memory and age, as well as hearing loss, were also the most consistent predictors of overall listening performance. Older listeners' immediate benefit from context in spoken-word recognition thus relates to their ability to keep and update a semantic representation of the sentence content in working memory.
Processing of fast speech by elderly listeners
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009
This study investigates the relative contributions of auditory and cognitive factors to the common finding that an increase in speech rate affects elderly listeners more than young listeners. Since a direct relation between non-auditory factors, such as age-related cognitive slowing, and fast speech performance has been difficult to demonstrate, the present study took an on-line, rather than off-line, approach and focused on processing time. Elderly and young listeners were presented with speech at two rates of time compression and were asked to detect pre-assigned target words as quickly as possible. A number of auditory and cognitive measures were entered in a statistical model as predictors of elderly participants' fast speech performance: hearing acuity, an information processing rate measure, and two measures of reading speed. The results showed that hearing loss played a primary role in explaining elderly listeners' increased difficulty with fast speech. However, non-auditory factors such as reading speed and the extent to which participants were affected by increased rate of presentation in a visual analog of the listening experiment also predicted fast speech performance differences among the elderly participants. These on-line results confirm that slowed information processing is indeed part of elderly listeners' problem keeping up with fast language.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008
Prior investigations, using isolated words as stimuli, have shown that older listeners tend to require longer temporal cues than younger listeners to switch their percept from one word to its phonetically contrasting counterpart. The extent to which this age effect occurs in sentence contexts is investigated in the present study. The hypothesis was that perception of temporal cues differs for words presented in isolation and a sentence context and that this effect may vary between younger and older listeners. Younger and older listeners with normal-hearing and older listeners with hearing loss identified phonetically contrasting word pairs in natural speech continua that varied by a single temporal cue: voice-onset time, vowel duration, transition duration, and silent interval duration. The words were presented in isolation and in sentences. A context effect was shown for most continua, in which listeners required longer temporal cues in sentences than in isolated words. Additionally, older listeners required longer cues at the crossover points than younger listeners for most but not all continua. In general, the findings support the conclusion that older listeners tend to require longer target temporal cues than younger normal-hearing listeners in identifying phonetically contrasting word pairs in isolation and sentence contexts.