Abstract：
Speakers can place their prosodic prominence on any locations within a sentence, generating focus prosody for listeners to perceive new information. This study aimed to investigate age-related changes in the bottom-up processing of focus perception in Jianghuai Mandarin by clarifying the perceptual cues and the auditory processing abilities involved in the identification of focus locations. Young, middle-aged, and older speakers of Jianghuai Mandarin completed a focus identification task and an auditory perception task. The results showed that increasing age led to a decrease in listeners\' accuracy rate in identifying focus locations, with all participants performing the worst when dynamic pitch cues were inaccessible. Auditory processing abilities did not predict focus perception performance in young and middle-aged listeners but accounted significantly for the variance in older adults\' performance. These findings suggest that age-related deteriorations in focus perception can be largely attributed to declined auditory processing of perceptual cues. Poor ability to extract frequency modulation cues may be the most important underlying psychoacoustic factor for older adults\' difficulties in perceiving focus prosody in Jianghuai Mandarin. The results contribute to our understanding of the bottom-up mechanisms involved in linguistic prosody processing in aging adults, particularly in tonal languages.
摘要：
演讲者可以将他们的韵律突出放在句子中的任何位置，产生焦点韵律，让听众感知新信息。本研究旨在通过阐明识别焦点位置所涉及的知觉线索和听觉处理能力，研究江淮普通话自下而上的焦点知觉处理中与年龄相关的变化。年轻,中年,年长的江淮普通话使用者完成了焦点识别任务和听觉感知任务。结果表明，年龄的增长导致听众识别焦点位置的准确率下降，当无法获得动态音高提示时，所有参与者的表现最差。听觉加工能力并不能预测中青年听众的注意力知觉表现，但对老年人表现的差异却有很大影响。这些发现表明，与年龄相关的焦点知觉恶化在很大程度上可以归因于知觉线索的听觉处理下降。提取调频线索的能力差可能是老年人难以感知江淮普通话中的焦点韵律的最重要的潜在心理声学因素。这些结果有助于我们理解老年人语言韵律加工的自下而上机制，特别是在音调语言中。
