Listening to spoken text: adult age differences as revealed by self-paced listening

An experiment is reported in which young and older adults heard spoken narratives presented in a segment-by-segment fashion using the auditory moving window (AMW) technique. Participants were instructed to initiate the presentation of each segment at their own pace, their goal being to insure good comprehension of the main ideas of the narratives. The pattern of pause times across passages was compared for passages being heard for the first time (novel condition) or after the participants had heard the passages several times before (familiar condition). The analysis of participants' pause durations in pacing through the passages suggests that although young and older adults respond similarly at the textbase level of processing, older adults do not allocate additional resources at the start of a passage in order to develop a mental model of the narrative. This pattern differs from that typically found in reading time studies.