Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150, USA.
Psychol Aging. 2010 Sep;25(3):702-7. doi: 10.1037/a0019266.
We tested the effects of aging on the use of prosody to convey meaning and the ability to monitor communicative effectiveness. Participants read aloud ambiguous sentences with the goal of clearly communicating one designated meaning. Young and older adults produced intonational boundaries consistent with the designated meaning equally often, but listener judgments indicated that older adults disambiguated the sentences more often than chance and young adults did so only marginally more often than chance. Young adults believed they communicated their message clearly, and older adults evaluated their own communication even more favorably. Participants were more confident for structurally ambiguous sentences than for lexically ambiguous sentences (which cannot be differentiated through prosody), and older adults demonstrated more overconfidence than young adults for both types of ambiguous sentences.
我们测试了衰老对使用韵律传达意义的影响，以及对监控交际效果的影响。参与者大声朗读带有歧义的句子，目的是清晰传达一个指定的意思。年轻人和老年人都同样经常使用与指定含义一致的语调边界，但听众的判断表明，老年人比年轻人更经常地消除句子的歧义，而且年轻人比年轻人更经常地消除句子的歧义。年轻人认为他们清楚地传达了自己的信息，而老年人则对自己的沟通评价更为有利。参与者对结构上有歧义的句子比词汇上有歧义的句子（不能通过韵律来区分）更有信心，而老年人对这两种有歧义的句子都表现出比年轻人更大的过度自信。
