Listening to Spoken Text: Adult Age Differences as Revealed by Self-paced Listening

ABSTRACT

An experiment is reported in which young and older adults heard spoken narratives presented in a segment-by-segment fashion using the auditory moving window (AMW) technique. Participants were instructed to initiate the presentation of each segment at their own pace, their goal being to insure good comprehension of the main ideas of the narratives. The pattern of pause times across passages was compared for passages being heard for the first time (novel condition) or after the participants had heard the passages several times before (familiar condition). The analysis of participants' pause durations in pacing through the passages suggests that although young and older adults respond similarly at the textbase level of processing, older adults do not allocate additional resources at the start of a passage in order to develop a mental model of the narrative. This pattern differs from that typically found in reading time studies.

This work was supported by NIH grant R37 AG04517 from the National Institute on Aging. The authors also gratefully acknowledge support from the W. M. Keck Foundation. The first author also acknowledges support from NIA training grant T32 AG00204 to Brandeis University. Elizabeth Stine-Morrow is thanked for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Notes on contributors

Deborah M. Little

Deborah M. Little is now at the Center for Stroke Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Kristen J. Prentice

Kristen J. Prentice is now at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, University of Maryland