Recognition of Interrupted Speech, Text, and Text-Supplemented Speech by Older Adults: Effect of Interruption Rate

Studies of speech and text interruption indicate that the interruption rate influences the perceptual information available, from whole words at slow rates to subphonemic cues at faster interruptions rates. In young adults, the benefit obtained from text supplementation of speech may depend on the type of perceptual information available in either modality. Age commonly reduces temporal aspects of information processing, which may influence the benefit older adults obtain from text-supplemented speech across interruption rates.

Older adults were tested unimodally and multimodally with spoken and printed sentences that were interrupted by silence or white space at various rates.

Results demonstrate U-shaped performance-rate functions for all modality conditions, with minimal performance around interruption rates of 2-4 Hz. Comparison to previous studies with younger adults indicates overall poorer recognition for interrupted materials by the older adults. However, as a group, older adults can integrate information between the two modalities to a similar degree as younger adults. Individual differences in multimodal integration were noted.

Overall, these results indicate that older adults, while demonstrating poorer overall performance in comparison to younger adults, successfully combine distributed partial information across speech and text modalities to facilitate sentence recognition.