Components of speech prosody and their use in detection of syntactic structure by older adults

Young and older adults heard sentences in which one character was describing another character ("The doctor said the nurse is thirsty"), where the character being described could be determined only by the prosodic pattern in which the sentence was heard. Using computer editing, the authors generated sentences that were heard with either one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2) of three ordinarily co-occurring prosodic features reduced (pitch variation, amplitude variation, timing variation). For both age groups, timing variation was the most valuable of the three prosodic features. These results add to our understanding of the effective preservation of spoken language comprehension in normal aging.