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Published on: January 23, 2017
Age differences for stop-consonant and vowel perception in adults
1Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center for Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee 37232, USA.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|October 30, 2001
Summary
Older adults show reduced consonant perception, relying more on integrated cues. Age did not significantly impact vowel perception or the age-related deficit hypothesis for dynamic spectral cues.
Area of Science:
- Auditory Perception
- Psychoacoustics
- Human Aging
Background:
- Auditory perception can be influenced by static, dynamic, and integrated auditory cues.
- The
- age-related deficit hypothesis
- predicts that older adults experience declines in sensory processing, including speech perception.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of static, dynamic, and integrated cues in speech perception across three adult age groups.
- To determine if age impacts consonant and vowel perception, testing the
- age-related deficit hypothesis
- .
Main Methods:
- Eight subjects per age group (young: 20-26, middle-aged: 52-59, old: 70-76) listened to synthesized consonant-vowel syllables.
- Stimuli varied formant transition (moving/straight), noise burst (present/absent), and voicing duration (10-46 ms).
Main Results:
- Vowel perception was consistently high across all age groups and conditions.
- Older adults performed significantly worse than younger and middle-aged adults in identifying consonants using secondary cues alone.
- Older adults utilized integrated static and dynamic cues more than younger groups for stop consonant identification.
- Voicing duration aided consonant identification in younger and middle-aged groups but not in older adults, suggesting reduced processing speed.
Conclusions:
- Age significantly affects consonant perception, with older adults showing deficits in processing secondary cues.
- Older adults compensate by relying more on the integration of static and dynamic cues.
- Findings suggest age-related reductions in processing speed for stop-consonant transitions.
- The study generally did not support the
- age-related deficit hypothesis
- for adult perception of vowels and consonants from dynamic spectral cues.
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