Effects of age and passage difficulty on listening-rate preferences for time-altered speech

When younger and older adults were allowed to adjust the speech rate of time-compressed and time-expanded speech passages, older adults tended to select as preferred rates significantly slower speech rates than the younger adults. Both age groups, however, selected slower rates for difficult speech passages (low cloze predictability) than for easy passages (high cloze predictability). Recall performance showed effects of speech rate and passage difficulty, with participants' recall at their selected speech rates comparable to their performance at slower rates. Results suggest that older adults are as effective as the young in their ability to monitor the difficulty of a speech passage as it is being heard and to moderate their listening rate selections accordingly.