Contextual encoding by young and elderly adults as revealed by cued and free recall

Perry, Anthony R.; Wingfield, Arthur

doi:10.1080/09289919408251454

Cited by 27 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In the case of older adults, it has been demonstrated that word recognition is facilitated by sentence context to an equal or greater degree than for young adults (cf. Cohen & Faulkner 1983; Dubno et al, 2000; Wingfield et al 1991; Perry & Wingfield 1994). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This general principle holds for older as well as for younger adults for both written (Madden 1988), and spoken words (Wingfield et al 1991; Perry & Wingfield 1994), and for older adults with reduced hearing acuity (Pichora-Fuller et al 1995; Dubno et al 2000; Grant & Seitz 2000). It is also embodied in the SPIN test and related speech-in-noise tests used in audiometric assessment, where intelligibility is recorded for words presented in background noise with or without a constraining linguistic context (Kalikow et al 1977; Wilson et al 2007).…”

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confidence: 93%

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Word Recognition Within a Linguistic Context

et al. 2012

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Objective Participants in traditional studies of the effects of context on spoken word recognition have been university undergraduates. When older adults have been included, they have typically been matched with these young adults for verbal ability or years of education. Although this may be a good strategy for eliminating confounding variables, it is not clear how results of these studies may extend to the general population of young and older adults. The objective of this study was to examine the effects of adult age, hearing acuity, verbal ability and cognitive function on the use of linguistic context in spoken word recognition. Design Fifty-three adults, aged 19 to 89, heard short sentences in which the final word was masked by multitalker babble. The level of babble was progressively reduced in 2 dB steps until the sentence-final word could be correctly identified. Published norms were used to construct sets of sentences in which the same word could be heard with three levels of predictability (low, medium, high) based on the linguistic context. In a fourth condition (no context) the words were preceded by a neutral carrier phrase. Participants received tests of verbal ability, with an emphasis on vocabulary knowledge, a brief test battery to assess cognitive function, and an assessment of hearing acuity based on pure-tone thresholds. Participants’ hearing acuity ranged from normal acuity to moderate hearing loss. Results Results showed that the signal-to-noise ratio necessary for correct word recognition varied inversely with the probability of that word occurring in the sentence context. Hearing loss had a significant effect on word recognition for words heard in a neutral context, but the effect of hearing acuity diminished progressively with increasing contextual probability of the target word. Hierarchical multiple regressions showed that hearing acuity accounted for a significant amount of the variance at the lowest three levels of contextual probability but not at the highest probability level tested. Cognitive function contributed significantly to the obtained variance in word recognition performance at all levels of contextual probability tested. Moreover, participant age accounted for a significant amount of variance even after hearing acuity and cognitive function were taken into account. Verbal ability in the range represented by the test participants did not contribute significantly to recognition performance in any of the context conditions. Conclusions Peripheral hearing acuity accounted for only a part of the variance in word recognition accuracy, with significant variance also contributed by individual differences in cognitive function and participant age. Results showed the ability to use linguistic context to aid spoken word recognition is sufficiently robust that a relatively wide range in verbal ability among native English speakers had no effect on recognition performance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 93%

Word Recognition Within a Linguistic Context

et al. 2012

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“…It has been well established that in challenging listening conditions, speech can often be understood if there is sufficient semantic or linguistic contextual support available to provide information about the degraded signal ͑e.g., Kalikow et al, 1977;Bilger et al, 1984͒. Further, older adults are particularly adept at using context to compensate for difficulties hearing a degraded acoustic signal, presumably having developed expertise because typical everyday listening conditions are often more perceptually challenging for them than they are for younger adults ͑Perry and Wingfield, 1994;Pichora-Fuller et al, 1995;Gordon-Salant and Fitzgibbons, 1997;Sommers and Danielson, 1999;Wingfield et al, 2005͒. The acoustic signal itself may also support spoken language comprehension by supplementing or augmenting the use of context based on semantic knowledge. Various studies have demonstrated that listeners can use phonological or prosodic information to direct attentional or top-down resources during spoken word recognition ͑Gow and Gordon, 1995;Marslen-Wilson and Tyler, 1980;Pitt and Samuel, 1990͒. Moreover, other situational cues, such as priming with a semantically related sentence ͑e.g., Gagné et al, 2002͒, pre-senting visual speech for speech reading ͑e.g., Sumby and Pollack, 1954͒, presenting written text or clear speech as feedback ͑e.g., Davis et al, 2005͒, spatially separating concurrent sounds ͑e.g., Freyman et al, 1999Freyman et al, , 2001Li et al, 2004͒, and increasing the pitch differences among simultaneous talkers ͑e.g., Mackersie and Prida, 2001͒ can all enhance speech intelligibility.…”

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confidence: 99%

Priming and sentence context support listening to noise-vocoded speech by younger and older adults

Sheldon

Pichora-Fuller

Schneider

2008

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

109

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Older adults are known to benefit from supportive context in order to compensate for age-related reductions in perceptual and cognitive processing, including when comprehending spoken language in adverse listening conditions. In the present study, we examine how younger and older adults benefit from two types of contextual support, predictability from sentence context and priming, when identifying target words in noise-vocoded sentences. In the first part of the experiment, benefit from context based on primarily semantic knowledge was evaluated by comparing the accuracy of identification of sentence-final target words that were either highly predictable or not predictable from the sentence context. In the second part of the experiment, benefit from priming was evaluated by comparing the accuracy of identification of target words when noise-vocoded sentences were either primed or not by the presentation of the sentence context without noise vocoding and with the target word replaced with white noise. Younger and older adults benefited from each type of supportive context, with the most benefit realized when both types were combined. Supportive context reduced the number of noise-vocoded bands needed for 50% word identification more for older adults than their younger counterparts.

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“…The general finding across studies is that older adults are at least as good and sometimes better at exploiting sentence context as younger adults (Perry & Wingfield, 1994; Wingfield et al, 1994; Pichora-Fuller et al, 1995: Frisina & Frisina, 1997; Gordon-Salant & Fitzgibbons, 1997; Sommers & Danielson, 1999; Dubno et al, 2000; Wingfield et al, 2005; Helfer & Freyman, 2008; Sheldon et al, 2008; Benichov et al, 2012; Woods et al, 2012; Lash et al, 2013). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Aging and Priming on Same/Different Judgments Between Text and Partially Masked Speech

et al. 2017

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Objectives It is well known from previous research that when listeners are told what they are about to hear before a degraded or partially masked auditory signal is presented, the speech signal “pops out” of the background and becomes considerably more intelligible. The goal of this research was to explore whether this priming effect is as strong in older adults as in younger adults. Design Fifty-six adults – 28 older and 28 younger – listened to “nonsense” sentences spoken by a female talker in the presence of a two-talker speech masker (also female) or a fluctuating speech-like noise masker at five signal-to-noise ratios. Just prior to, or just after, the auditory signal was presented, a typed caption was displayed on a computer screen. The caption sentence was either identical to the auditory sentence or differed by one key word. The subjects’ task was to decide whether the caption and auditory messages were the same or different. Discrimination performance was reported in d′. The strength of the pop-out perception was inferred from the improvement in performance that was expected from the caption-before order of presentation. A subset of 12 subjects from each group made confidence judgments as they gave their responses, and also completed several cognitive tests. Results Data showed a clear order effect for both subject groups and both maskers, with better same-different discrimination performance for the caption-before condition than the caption-after condition. However, for the two-talker masker, the younger adults obtained a larger and more consistent benefit from the caption-before order than the older adults across signal-to-noise ratios. Especially at the poorer signal-to-noise ratios, older subjects showed little evidence that they experienced the pop-out effect that is presumed to make the discrimination task easier. On average, older subjects also appeared to approach the task differently, being more reluctant than younger subjects to report that the captions and auditory sentences were same. Correlation analyses indicated a significant negative association between age and priming benefit in the two-talker masker and non-significant associations between priming benefit in this masker and either high-frequency hearing loss or performance on the cognitive tasks. Conclusions Previous studies have shown that older adults are at least as good, if not better, at exploiting context in speech recognition, as compared to younger adults. The current results are not in disagreement with those findings but suggest that, under some conditions, the automatic priming process that may contribute to context benefits is not as strong in older as in younger adults.

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Contextual encoding by young and elderly adults as revealed by cued and free recall

Cited by 27 publications

References 33 publications

Word Recognition Within a Linguistic Context

Word Recognition Within a Linguistic Context

Priming and sentence context support listening to noise-vocoded speech by younger and older adults

The Effect of Aging and Priming on Same/Different Judgments Between Text and Partially Masked Speech

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