Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences
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Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 54, Issue 6 P347-P349, Copyright © 1999 by The Gerontological Society of America

ARTICLES

Some limits on encoding visible speech and gestures using a dichotic shadowing task

LA Thompson and FA Guzman
Psychology Dept., New Mexico State University, Las Cruces 88003, USA. thompson@crl.nmsu.edu

Visible speech and gestures are two forms of available language information that can be used by listeners to help them understand the speaker's meaning. Previous research has shown that older adults are particularly dependent on visible speech, yet seem to profit less than younger adults from the speaker's gestures. To understand how visible speech and gestures are used when listening becomes difficult, the authors conducted an experiment with a dichotic shadowing task. The experiment examined how accurately participants could shadow the right- or left-ear input when instructed to attend selectively to a particular ear and whether performance benefited from visual input. The results indicate that older adults' shadowing performance was unaffected by visible speech and gestures. Younger adults did benefit by both visible speech and gestures. Thus, under extremely attention-demanding listening conditions, older adults are unable to use a compensatory mechanism for encoding visual language.




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