TY - JOUR
T1 - Dissociations in perceptual learning revealed by adult age differences in adaptation to time-compressed speech
AU - Peelle, Jonathan E.
AU - Wingfield, Arthur
PY - 2005/12
Y1 - 2005/12
N2 - When presented with several time-compressed sentences, young adults' performance improves with practice. Such adaptation has not been studied in older adults. To study age-related changes in perceptual learning, the authors tested young and older adults' ability to adapt to degraded speech. First, the authors showed that older adults, when equated for starting accuracy with young adults, adapted at a rate and magnitude comparable to young adults. However, unlike young adults, older adults failed to transfer this learning to a different speech rate and did not show additional benefit when practice exceeded 20 sentences. Listeners did not adapt to speech degraded by noise, indicating that adaptation to time-compressed speech was not attributable to task familiarity. Finally, both young and older adults adapted to spectrally shifted noise-vocoded speech. The authors conclude that initial perceptual learning is comparable in young and older adults but maintenance and transfer of this learning decline with age.
AB - When presented with several time-compressed sentences, young adults' performance improves with practice. Such adaptation has not been studied in older adults. To study age-related changes in perceptual learning, the authors tested young and older adults' ability to adapt to degraded speech. First, the authors showed that older adults, when equated for starting accuracy with young adults, adapted at a rate and magnitude comparable to young adults. However, unlike young adults, older adults failed to transfer this learning to a different speech rate and did not show additional benefit when practice exceeded 20 sentences. Listeners did not adapt to speech degraded by noise, indicating that adaptation to time-compressed speech was not attributable to task familiarity. Finally, both young and older adults adapted to spectrally shifted noise-vocoded speech. The authors conclude that initial perceptual learning is comparable in young and older adults but maintenance and transfer of this learning decline with age.
KW - Aging
KW - Frequency shifted speech
KW - Perceptual learning
KW - Speech comprehension
KW - Time compressed speech
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=32644482750&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1037/0096-1523.31.6.1315
DO - 10.1037/0096-1523.31.6.1315
M3 - Article
C2 - 16366792
AN - SCOPUS:32644482750
VL - 31
SP - 1315
EP - 1330
JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
SN - 0096-1523
IS - 6
ER -