Spoken Language Comprehension in Older Adults: Interactions between Sensory and Cognitive Change in Normal Aging

ABSTRACT

Adult aging is accompanied by changes in cognitive factors, such as a general slowing in perceptual and cognitive operations, a limitation in working memory capacity, and reduced efficiency of executive function in dividing attention. This article considers how these factors join with changes in hearing ability to affect how well older adults are able to comprehend speech and encode that understanding in memory for later use. Factors receiving special attention are negative effects of rapid speech rates and speech heard in background noise. Also examined are positive effects of linguistic context and effective use of speech prosody in speech comprehension and recall in older adults.

KEYWORD

Speech recognition - speech prosody - time-compressed speech - cognitive

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