Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, Vol 54, Issue 2 P125-P134, Copyright © 1999 by The Gerontological Society of America
The effects of context and feedback on age differences in spoken word recognition
EA Stine-Morrow, LM Soederberg Miller and JA Nevin
Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA. [email protected]
We investigated the hypothesis that age differences in speech
discrimination would be reduced by enhancing the distinctiveness of the
speech processing event in terms of both the context of encoding and the
response outcome. Younger and older adults performed an auditory lexical
decision task in which the degree of semantic constraint (context) and type
of feedback were manipulated. Main effects of age indicated that older
adults generally showed lower discriminability (D) and greater bias (B)
toward reporting signals to be words. Consistent with the environmental
support hypothesis, older adults were differentially facilitated in
discriminability by feedback, but only when semantic context was provided.
Also, for both younger and older adults, feedback and context each had the
effect of reducing bias and facilitating the speed of rejecting nonwords.
Contrary to one suggestion in the literature that aging brings an
insensitivity to environmental contingency, older adults were at least as
capable as the young in taking advantage of feedback to normalize the
speech signal so as to increase discriminability and decrease bias.
