Regaining lost time: Adult aging and the effect of time restoration on recall of time-compressed speech.

Wingfield, Arthur; Tun, Patricia A.; Koh, Christine K.; Rosen, Merri J.

doi:10.1037/0882-7974.14.3.380

Cited by 103 publications

(89 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Because we focus on the time course of language comprehension here, it is most straightforward to describe differences in young and old in terms of processing speed. Our use of this term is certainly consistent with accounts of slowing in cognitive aging (Salthouse, 1996) and with many characterizations of older adults as having slowed language processing abilities (e.g., Hale & Myerson, 1995;Myerson, Ferraro, Hale, & Lima, 1992;Stine & Hindman, 1994;Wingfield, Tun, Koh, & Rosen, 1999), but for now we leave open the possibility that speed changes could stem from or cause other changes, such as inhibitory ability. We return to these issues in the General Discussion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 56%

Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

2006

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Older and younger adults' abilities to use context information rapidly during ambiguity resolution were investigated. In Experiments 1 and 2, younger and older adults heard ambiguous words (e.g., fires) in sentences where the preceding context supported either the less frequent or more frequent meaning of the word. Both age groups showed good context use in offline tasks, but only young adults demonstrated rapid use of context in cross-modal naming. A 3rd experiment demonstrated that younger and older adults had similar knowledge about the contexts used in Experiments 1 and 2. The experiment results were simulated in 2 computational models in which different patterns of context use were shown to emerge from varying a single speed parameter. These results suggest that age-related changes in processing efficiency can modulate context use during language comprehension.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 56%

Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

2006

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“…The pauses improved listeners' comprehension. This benefit only arose if pauses were at linguistically appropriate locations in the speech signal (not at random or uniform locations), and the benefit leveled off once the pauses had increased the duration of the whole recording back to its original length before the artificial speeding process [21]. Two explanations for this link between comprehension and the presence of pauses at linguisticallyappropriate locations in speech were proposed: (1) pauses may help listeners more easily determine sentence/clause boundaries in the performance or (2) pauses at appropriate phrase boundaries give the listener some additional time to mentally "chunk" units of information and process/remember them more effectively.…”

Section: Motivations and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One study increased the speed of an English speech recording, and researchers later inserted pauses at linguistically appropriate locations (between sentences, between clauses, between phrases) [21]. The pauses improved listeners' comprehension.…”

Section: Motivations and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of a psycholinguistically motivated timing model for animations of american sign language

Huenerfauth

2008

Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

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Using results in the psycholinguistics literature on the speed and timing of American Sign Language (ASL), we built algorithms to calculate the time-duration of signs and the location/length of pauses during an ASL animation. We conducted a study in which native ASL signers evaluated the ASL animations processed by our algorithms, and we found that: (1) adding linguistically motivated pauses and variations in sign-durations improved signers' performance on a comprehension task and (2) these animations were rated as more understandable by ASL signers. Categories and Subject Descriptors General TermsAlgorithms, Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. KeywordsAmerican Sign Language, Animation, Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, Accessibility Technology for the Deaf. MOTIVATIONS AND RELATED WORKAmerican Sign Language (ASL) is a full natural language; signers use their hands, facial expression, eye gaze, head tilt, and body posture to convey linguistic meaning. ASL is not just a manual presentation of an English sentence; it has its own word-order, syntactic constructions, and vocabulary of signs (which may not have one-to-one equivalence with English words). ASL is used as a primary means of communication for about one half million people in the United States [15]. Because of the differences between English and ASL, it is possible to have ASL fluency yet significant difficulty reading English. In fact, a majority of deaf 18-year-olds in the United States have an English reading level below average 10-year-old hearing students [10]. Unfortunately, websites and other written-English information sources can also pose a challenge for deaf adults with low literacy skills. Software that can display computer-generated animations of American Sign Language can make more information, communication, and services accessible to these users. These ASL animations may be scripted by a content developer [13,19] or generated by Englishto-ASL automatic machine translation software [2,12,14,17].ASL signing conveys information at the same rate as spoken English [1], but the average speed at which most adults can read English text is much faster than the speed of spoken English audio. For deaf adults with low literacy to access information at a speed comparable to English-reading adults, ASL animations would need to be displayed quickly (while maintaining their understandability). The literature contains a range of values for "normal" signing speed: from 1.5 to 2.37 signs per second [1,6]. When ASL videos are played faster than 2.5 times normal, viewers' comprehension of the video drops significantly [4].Studies of English speech have shown a link between the presence of linguistic pauses and comprehension of the audio. One study increased the speed of an English speech recording, and researchers later inserted pauses at linguistically appropriate locations (between sentences, between clauses, between phrases) [21]. The pauses improved listeners' comprehension. This benefit only arose if pauses were at linguistically appro...

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“…It is well known that older adults are differentially affected by time compression of speech in comparison with younger adults (Gordon-Salant & Fitzgibbons, 1993;Wingfield, Tun, Koh, & Rosen, 1999). As such, one would expect to see the overall height of older listeners' intelligibility curves to be especially affected by rapid speech.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of alternated speech operates similarly in young and older adults with age-normal hearing

Stewart

Yetton

Wingfield

2008

Perception & Psychophysics

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The human auditory system is adept at handling concurrent and overlapping sound sources-such as multiple speakers or speech heard in background clutter-using their spatial, temporal, and spectral features to segregate them into separate auditory streams for further analysis (Bregman, 1990;Sussman, eponiené, Shestakova, Näätänen, & Winkler, 2001). The subject of our present inquiry is what happens when the human auditory system is confronted with a single message that is alternated rapidly between two spatial sources.The first demonstration of the consequences of this effect was by Cherry and Taylor (1954), who used an electronic switch to rapidly alternate speech back and forth between the two earpieces of dichotic earphones. They reported that intelligibility progressively declined with increasing rates of alternation, becoming poorest at approximately 3 to 5 complete switching cycles per second (cps), a rate corresponding to about 167 to 100 msec per ear. As the alternation rate was increased beyond this point, intelligibility paradoxically improved, thus yielding a V-shaped function of intelligibility decline and intelligibility recovery over successively increasing alternation rates. The size of the decrement at this critical rate is smaller when the speech materials are predictable enough to allow missed elements to be inferred from the linguistic context (cf. Speaks & Trooien, 1974;Wingfield & Wheale, 1975a) and larger when perceptual processing is made more difficult by mixing masking noise with the speech signal (Rupf, Hughes, & House, 1971). The basic V-shaped intelligibility function remains, however, as interaural alternation rates are progressively increased.The intelligibility loss at the critical rate of 3 to 5 alternating cps is intriguing because the speech is always present, either in one ear or the other. Cherry and Taylor (1954) attributed this loss to the time it takes a listener to switch attention from one ear to the other in order to follow the shifting signal. If each shift of attention from one ear to the other is accompanied by a perceptual "dead time," during which no usable information is available from either ear, as alternation rates increase, so would the cumulative loss of information. Cherry and Taylor (1954) argued that the point of minimal intelligibility in the V-shaped intelligibility function marks the point at which the listener's switching attention is completely out of phase with the shifting signal: By the time the listener's attention has shifted from one ear to the other to follow the signal, the speech would already have returned to the original ear. They accounted for the improved intelligibility when alternation rates are increased beyond this point by suggesting that, at these very rapid rates, listeners begin to concentrate on the input from only one ear. The result would be an interrupted signal to the attended ear in which the frequent but brief interruptions would result in a perceptual "picket fence" effect, with the broad speech envelope still recognizable. T...

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Regaining lost time: Adult aging and the effect of time restoration on recall of time-compressed speech.

Cited by 103 publications

References 46 publications

Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

Aging and the Use of Context in Ambiguity Resolution: Complex Changes From Simple Slowing

Evaluation of a psycholinguistically motivated timing model for animations of american sign language

Perception of alternated speech operates similarly in young and older adults with age-normal hearing

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