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., Data were collected via Gorilla Experiment Builder and hosted on Prolific to obtain participant responses. Data was downloaded from Gorilla and R was used to remove the columns in the dataframe that were not necessary for analysis.  , , # Young and older adult vowel categorization responses

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.brv15dvh0](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.brv15dvh0)

On each trial, participants heard a stimulus and clicked a box on the computer screen to indicate whether they heard \"SET\" or \"SAT.\" Responses of \"SET\" are coded as 0 and responses of \"SAT\" are coded as 1. The continuum steps, from 1-7, for duration and spectral quality cues of the stimulus on each trial are named \"DurationStep\" and \"SpectralStep,\" respectively. Group (young or older adult) and listening condition (quiet or noise) information are provided for each row of the dataset.