Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 54, Issue 3 P199-P202, Copyright © 1999 by The Gerontological Society of America
Effects of age and passage difficulty on listening-rate preferences for time-altered speech
A Wingfield and JL Ducharme
Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. wingfield@volen.brandeis.edu
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.
