LISTENING TO FAST SPEECH: AGING AND SENTENCE CONTEXT

Esther Janse1, Majoke van der Werff2 & Hugo Quené2
1Utrecht institute of Linguistics UiL OTS & Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics; 2Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS

ID 1258
[full paper]

In this study we investigated to what extent a meaningful sentence context facilitates spoken word processing in young and older listeners if listening is made taxing by time-compressing the speech. Even though elderly listeners have been shown to benefit more from sentence context in difficult listening conditions than young listeners, time compression of speech may interfere with semantic comprehension, particularly in older listeners because of cognitive slowing. The results of a target detection experiment showed that, unlike young listeners who showed facilitation by context at both rates, elderly listeners showed context facilitation at the intermediate, but not at the fastest rate. This suggests that semantic interpretation lags behind target identification.