Comprehension of envelope-only sentences by English-speaking adults and children and Mandarin-speaking adults

Abstract

Listeners comprehend sentences when only amplitude envelope information for a few bandlimited channels is available, but there is variability in their abilities to do so. This experiment asked whether the variability in listeners’ abilities to comprehend these signals is best explained by variability in magnitude of linguistic context effects, in auditory processing, or in sensitivity to structural organization at a global level. Stimuli were 30 four-word syntactically appropriate, semantically anomalous sentences, processed to preserve envelope information in 4 or 8 channels. Listeners were two groups of native English speakers (adults and 7-year-old children) and one group of native Mandarin speakers (adults) who were proficient enough in English to be graduate students at an American university. The sentences provided linguistic context that should affect comprehension equally for all these listeners, so that possible outcomes were (1) All three groups would perform similarly if abilities to use linguistic context best explained previously reported variability; (2) both adult groups would perform similarly and better than children if age-related differences in auditory processing best explained variability; and (3) English-speaking children and Mandarin-speaking adults would perform similarly and poorer than English-speaking adults if sensitivity to global structure best explained variability. Results matched possible outcome ♯3. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. DC-00633.]