Abstract:
Age-related changes in auditory processing may reduce physiological coding of acoustic cues, contributing to older adults\' difficulty perceiving speech in background noise. This study investigated whether older adults differed from young adults in patterns of acoustic cue weighting for categorizing vowels in quiet and in noise. All participants relied primarily on spectral quality to categorize /ɛ/ and /æ/ sounds under both listening conditions. However, relative to young adults, older adults exhibited greater reliance on duration and less reliance on spectral quality. These results suggest that aging alters patterns of perceptual cue weights that may influence speech recognition abilities.
摘要:
听觉处理中与年龄相关的变化可能会减少声学线索的生理编码,导致老年人在背景噪音中难以感知语音。这项研究调查了老年人在对安静和噪音中的元音进行分类的声学线索加权模式上是否与年轻人不同。在两种聆听条件下,所有参与者都主要依靠频谱质量来对声音进行分类。然而,相对于年轻人,老年人对持续时间的依赖程度更高,对光谱质量的依赖程度更低.这些结果表明,老化会改变可能影响语音识别能力的感知线索权重的模式。