Passage difficulty, speech rate, and age differences in memory for spoken text: Speech recall and the complexity hypothesis

Riggs, Karen M.; Wingfield, Arthur; Tun, Patricia A.

doi:10.1080/03610739308253926

Cited by 32 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…There is ample evidence that older adults suffer a differentially greater processing challenge from rapid speech than their younger counterparts, and that this challenge in turn is greater for extended narrative length passages than for short sentences (cf., Riggs, Wingfield, & Tun, 1993;Wingfield, Peelle, & Grossman, 2003). That these results reflect a strategic approach to discourse length material rather than a general response to all speech is supported by the contrast between the present results and findings for sentence-length material where older adults do show longer AMW pause latencies than young adults (Waters & Caplan, 2001;Fallon et al, under review).…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 79%

Listening to Spoken Text: Adult Age Differences as Revealed by Self-paced Listening

Little

Prentice

Darrow

et al. 2005

Experimental Aging Research

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An experiment is reported in which young and older adults heard spoken narratives presented in a segment-by-segment fashion using the auditory moving window (AMW) technique. Participants were instructed to initiate the presentation of each segment at their own pace, their goal being to insure good comprehension of the main ideas of the narratives. The pattern of pause times across passages was compared for passages being heard for the first time (novel condition) or after the participants had heard the passages several times before (familiar condition). The analysis of participants' pause durations in pacing through the passages suggests that although young and older adults respond similarly at the textbase level of processing, older adults do not allocate additional resources at the start of a passage in order to develop a mental model of the narrative. This pattern differs from that typically found in reading time studies.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 79%

Listening to Spoken Text: Adult Age Differences as Revealed by Self-paced Listening

Little

Prentice

Darrow

et al. 2005

Experimental Aging Research

Self Cite

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“…For those with poor hearing, reducing the rate of word presentation, for example by increasing the delay between words, can lead to better comprehension and better word recall (Stine et al, 1986; Riggs et al, 1993; Wingfield et al, 2006; Grimley, 2007). Conversely, reducing the time between words reduces intelligibility of passages, as would be expected if prior words are more often lost from memory when word frequency increases.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(3) Slowing the presentation rate of stimuli increases recall probability (Riggs et al, 1993; Wingfield et al, 1999). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Distinct effects of perceptual quality on auditory word recognition, memory formation and recall in a neural model of sequential memory

Miller

Wingfield

2010

Front. Syst. Neurosci.

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Adults with sensory impairment, such as reduced hearing acuity, have impaired ability to recall identifiable words, even when their memory is otherwise normal. We hypothesize that poorer stimulus quality causes weaker activity in neurons responsive to the stimulus and more time to elapse between stimulus onset and identification. The weaker activity and increased delay to stimulus identification reduce the necessary strengthening of connections between neurons active before stimulus presentation and neurons active at the time of stimulus identification. We test our hypothesis through a biologically motivated computational model, which performs item recognition, memory formation and memory retrieval. In our simulations, spiking neurons are distributed into pools representing either items or context, in two separate, but connected winner-takes-all (WTA) networks. We include associative, Hebbian learning, by comparing multiple forms of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), which strengthen synapses between coactive neurons during stimulus identification. Synaptic strengthening by STDP can be sufficient to reactivate neurons during recall if their activity during a prior stimulus rose strongly and rapidly. We find that a single poor quality stimulus impairs recall of neighboring stimuli as well as the weak stimulus itself. We demonstrate that within the WTA paradigm of word recognition, reactivation of separate, connected sets of non-word, context cells permits reverse recall. Also, only with such coactive context cells, does slowing the rate of stimulus presentation increase recall probability. We conclude that significant temporal overlap of neural activity patterns, absent from individual WTA networks, is necessary to match behavioral data for word recall.

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“…In view of the fact that the older adults showed poorer recall than the young, however, it could be argued that the older adults' preferred rates were inappropriately farther from their optimal rates than the rates selected by the young. Older adults are generally known to be at a disadvantage when information loads are high, whether the information load is manipulated by increasing speech rates or by varying the informational complexity of the speech (Riggs, Wingfield, & Tun, 1993). That is, at any given rate the information load will be proportionally higher for the older adults with consequent effects on comprehension and memory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Age and Passage Difficulty on Listening-Rate Preferences for Time-Altered Speech

Wingfield

Ducharme

1999

The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences an

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When younger and older adults were allowed to adjust the speech rate of time-compressed and time-expanded speech passages, older adults tended to select as preferred rates significantly slower speech rates than the younger adults. Both age groups, however, selected slower rates for difficult speech passages (low cloze predictability) than for easy passages (high cloze predictability). Recall performance showed effects of speech rate and passage difficulty, with participants' recall at their selected speech rates comparable to their performance at slower rates. Results suggest that older adults are as effective as the young in their ability to monitor the difficulty of a speech passage as it is being heard and to moderate their listening rate selections accordingly.

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Passage difficulty, speech rate, and age differences in memory for spoken text: Speech recall and the complexity hypothesis

Cited by 32 publications

References 27 publications

Listening to Spoken Text: Adult Age Differences as Revealed by Self-paced Listening

Listening to Spoken Text: Adult Age Differences as Revealed by Self-paced Listening

Distinct effects of perceptual quality on auditory word recognition, memory formation and recall in a neural model of sequential memory

Effects of Age and Passage Difficulty on Listening-Rate Preferences for Time-Altered Speech

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