Young and older adult vowel categorization responses

Age-related changes in auditory processing may reduce physiological coding
of acoustic cues, contributing to older adults’ difficulty perceiving
speech in background noise. This study investigated whether older adults
differed from young adults in patterns of acoustic cue weighting for
categorizing vowels in quiet and in noise. All participants relied
primarily on spectral quality to categorize /Ꜫ/ and /æ/ sounds in both
listening conditions. However, relative to young adults, older adults
exhibited greater reliance on duration and less reliance on spectral
quality. These results suggest that aging alters patterns of perceptual
cue weights that may influence speech recognition abilities.

与年龄相关的听觉加工（auditory processing）变化可能会降低声学线索（acoustic cues）的生理编码效率，进而导致老年人在背景噪声环境下识别言语存在困难。本研究旨在探究老年人与青年人在安静及噪声环境下对元音进行分类时的声学线索权重模式是否存在差异。所有被试在两种聆听条件下，均主要依靠频谱品质（spectral quality）对/Ꜫ/与/æ/音进行分类。然而与青年人相比，老年人对时长（duration）的依赖程度更高，而对频谱品质的依赖程度更低。上述结果表明，衰老会改变知觉线索权重（perceptual cue weights）模式，这可能会对言语识别能力产生影响。