TY - JOUR
T1 - Speech Rate and Syntactic Complexity as Multiplicative Factors in Speech Comprehension by Young and Older Adults
AU - Wingfield, Arthur
AU - Peelle, Jonathan E.
AU - Grossman, Murray
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge support from NIH grants AG04517 and AG19714 from the National Institute on Aging, and Training Grants AG00204 and NSF-IGERT 9972756. We also gratefully acknowledge support from the W.M. Keck Foundation. A version of this paper was presented at the annual scientific meeting of the Academy of Aphasia, New York, NY, October, 2002.
PY - 2003/12
Y1 - 2003/12
N2 - An experiment is reported in which young and older adults heard short English sentences that differed in syntactic complexity and speech rate. The syntactic contrast pitted center-embedded sentences with a subject-relative clause against sentences with center-embedded object-relative clauses. Speech rate was varied using computer time-compression of the speech signal. Both young and older adults showed poorer comprehension accuracy for the more complex object-relative clause sentences than subject-relative sentences, with an age difference appearing only when sentences were presented at a very rapid rate. By contrast to accuracy scores, older adults took longer than the young adults to give their comprehension responses at all speech rates tested, with this age difference amplified by both speech rate and syntactic complexity.
AB - An experiment is reported in which young and older adults heard short English sentences that differed in syntactic complexity and speech rate. The syntactic contrast pitted center-embedded sentences with a subject-relative clause against sentences with center-embedded object-relative clauses. Speech rate was varied using computer time-compression of the speech signal. Both young and older adults showed poorer comprehension accuracy for the more complex object-relative clause sentences than subject-relative sentences, with an age difference appearing only when sentences were presented at a very rapid rate. By contrast to accuracy scores, older adults took longer than the young adults to give their comprehension responses at all speech rates tested, with this age difference amplified by both speech rate and syntactic complexity.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=1642574261&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1076/anec.10.4.310.28974
DO - 10.1076/anec.10.4.310.28974
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:1642574261
SN - 1382-5585
VL - 10
SP - 310
EP - 322
JO - Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
JF - Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
IS - 4
ER -