AGE-RELATED CHANGES IN THE PERCEPTION OF SPEECH

本研究将探讨可能与年龄相关的认知变化， 老年受试者的言语感知能力在几个不同的 语言水平。 这些包括分段中的听觉/语音处理 识别与判别，动态声信号的处理 元音感知中的线索，以及单词中自上而下的过程 识别. 每个实验室将进行几个不同的实验。 这三个主题领域。 由于听觉灵敏度的变化几乎 不可避免地与年龄因素有关，实验设计将 通过（1）包括老年人和年轻人来控制听力损失 他们至少表现出与他们年龄相当的“正常”听力敏感度， （2）包括老年人和年轻人，他们表现出相同的 听力损失的范围;（3）使用适当的统计方法， 在确定是否与年龄有关时控制听力灵敏度 效果存在。 需要解决的基本问题包括： 以下：是否有听觉/语音记忆的变化，在老化， 与听力敏感度变化无关吗 是否有年龄相关的 个人语音处理快速变化的声音的方式的变化 信息（如共振峰频率），以使元音 身份证明？ 老年人是否更多（或更少）使用 比年轻的听众更容易获得自上而下的信息 的 我们的实验结果将在两个方面进行评估， 相关的老龄化文献和言语的相关理论模型 生产和单词识别。 这些数据应该可以更准确地 一般来说，对衰老过程的理解，以及语言的类型 特别是老年人可能面临的处理困难。

The present study will examine possible age-related cognitive changes in the speech perception abilities of older subjects at several different linguistic levels. These include auditory/phonetic processing in segment identification and discrimination, the processing of dynamic acoustic cues in the perception of vowels, and top-down processes in word recognition. Several different experiments will be conducted within each of these three topic areas. Since hearing sensitivity changes are almost inevitably associated with the age factor, the experimental design will control for hearing loss by (1) including older and younger individuals who demonstrate at least "normal" hearing sensitivity for their age group; (2) including both older and younger individuals who show the same range of hearing loss; and (3) using appropriate statistical methods to control for hearing sensitivity while determining if and age-related effect is present. The basic questions to be addressed include the following: Are there auditory/phonetic memory changes in aging which are separable from hearing sensitivity changes? Are there age-related changes in how individuals phonetically process rapidly changing acoustic information (such as formant frequencies) in order to make vowel identifications? Do older individuals make greater (or lesser) use of top-down information in word recognition than do younger listeners? The results of our experiments will be evaluated in terms of both the relevant aging literature and the relevant theoretical models of speech production and word recognition. These data should allow a more accurate understanding of the aging process, in general, and the types of speech processing difficulties the older individual may face, in particular.