Adult aging and listening patterns for spoken prose: spontaneous segmentation versus self-paced listening.

Young and older adults were allowed to control the delivery rate of spoken prose for later recall using two methods. In one method (spontaneous segmentation), participants were allowed to interrupt speech passages whenever they wished. In the other method (self-paced listening), speech passages were presented in segments, with participants allowed to initiate presentation of subsequent segments via a key-press. Older adults' segment sizes in the spontaneous segmentation condition were unchanged when the passages were presented for a second time. By contrast, pause latencies to initiating subsequent segments in the self-paced listening condition were affected by experience with the passage. Results suggested that the segment sizes selected in the spontaneous segmentation condition were driven by the linguistic structure and prosody of the speech, rather than reflecting ineffective metamemory on the part of the older adults.